Originally posted by SioBabble

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.

Totally agree SioBabble; SWG on the whole was an amazing idea, and that's about it.  If not for the community and IP, I doubt SWG would've lasted more than a few months. 

At the time some patience was expected from players, but lets face it the game was utterly borked. 

As for the numbers, I'd speculate SWG never breeched 100k concurrent distinct players (not accounts). 

OP you have some good points, but I think the loss of subs after NGE speaks for itself.  They never recovered from that either, so SOE was flat out wrong and the gamers have already spoken on which version they prefer.

Also you say, 'It's just a game'.  Yeah.  Football and soccer are just games too, but I know people who take them VERY seriously.  To you perhaps games mean little, but to others they mean a lot.  Just like people can have different opinions on a game, people can also be different in terms of how much importance they put on various aspects of their lives. 

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.

 

SOE lies to it's players quite a bit, the NGE was just one example.  You are either ignorant of this fact which has been elucidated upon exhaustively by many players across several games, or you are just a fanboy.

In your post you talk about shooting mothers, getting dogs pregnant, and SOE doesn't lie.  I am thinking you are the psychotic one.

Originally posted by Terranah

OP you have some good points, but I think the loss of subs after NGE speaks for itself.  They never recovered from that either, so SOE was flat out wrong and the gamers have already spoken on which version they prefer.

This is all that needs to be said when people argue that the NGE is better (lol) than the original game. 250k-350k players back then...less than 10k now.

OP, Pre-CU SWG definitely had flaws.  Not even the most die-hard Pre-CU fan can deny it.  There were SERIOUS flaws in there, such as 90% Stun Composite Armor in conjunction with the buffs that enabled players to wear them.

However, warts and all, Pre-CU offered quite alot, even in today's general style of MMORPG gameplay.  Pre-CU SWG **was** good, IMO.

+ You were not stuck on the tired, old, static "Class + Level" system.  The Skillpoint / Template System gave you the freedom to build your character's skillset the way YOU want, not what some nitwit said that you will do.

+ You COULD be a Lemming and be a FOTM Templater and be devoid of any imagination whatsoever.  There were a bunch that did.  But guess what?  The Skillpoint / Template System allowed creative individuals to come up with effective templates of their own.

+ Tired of your character's current template?  No problem.  Drop skillboxes bit by bit and work towards your new template little by little.  No need to roll a new toon.

+ Show me any other MMORPG ever since SWG came out in 2003 that had anywhere the same level of gameplay and depth as Pre-CU SWG crafting did, while retaining a true player run economy.

+ How many other MMORPGs had deep enough gameplay in NON-COMBAT aspects where a good number of players *rarely or never* engaged / sought combat?

+ Complaining about the Grind in old & newer versions of SWG?  Then you haven't played much other MMOs, since there are some that put Pre-CU SWG's grind to shame.  I recall most vividly (more accurately, "agonizingly") Lineage II.  Playing that game made me realize my definition of an MMO grind had to be redone with these new horrific standards.  Anyways, ALL MMORPGs have grinds.  That is their hook to keep you playing.  WoW has it, LotRO has it, SWG has it, etc.

Kill X amount of critters to get enough XPs / Levels.

Do a dozen petty quests and be an errand boy across the same landscape.

Execute a special move X amount of times to get an improved ablity.

What's the difference?  Not a god-d**n thing.  They all force you to devote time in playing the game, that's it.  It's what all developers do to players in all MMORPGs.  That's inescapable.

===========

Just some of the reasons why I still hold Pre-CU SWG up even among the current stock of MMORPGs.

It was and IS different from the current stock of MMOs.  It gave the freedom of gameplay back to the players.

Warts and all, Pre-CU SWG was good.  But the problem was the devs themselves who fixed the game in a half-a**ed, slow manner.  Not to mention working secretly in the background in dropping the system altogether.

Where would SWG be now if SOE had bothered to actually fix the d**n thing instead of bringing in unwanted revamp after unwanted revamp?

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Originally posted by Nebless
BECAUSE it’s the only one SOE now offers. IF SOE offered both pre & post versions than you could argue which one, but they don’t.

---

Well, actually... It's not SOE sponsored (that i know of) but it IS playable. And from what i see, they are making goof progress in completing the project. Just look up SWGEmu.

Originally posted by redriver

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
 

I was probably halfway through pistols by the time I could comfortably stand toe to toe, from what I recall.  Seeing as how Master TK's could wipe out 5 Rancor in about 30 seconds, what you say wouldn't surprise me.  Just reminds me of yet another way pre-cu wasn't Star Wars.

"Hey Luke!  Go kick that rock over there until more critters come out!"

That would've made a GREAT movie.

Originally posted by clatonious

I think one thing the OP is missing is the fact of what old SWG could've/should've evovled into - thus making it a hands down no comparison to the changes and which was truly better.  Yes it had a ton of bugs, a whole lotta imbalance, and needed refinement in a major way.  But the fact remains that there's not been a game since that had the potential and the downright fun of what swg once was.

True, although SWG was destined to be forever hampered by its engine, which was nearly obsolete when the game released. 

But yes indeedy, they'd have had much more bang for the buck for their resources had they implemented content that worked with that engine, instead of creating all new gameplay that it couldn't handle. 

"Hey!  Let's take the engine from Neverwinter Nights to make the next Gears of War!" 

They weren't looking too far down the road when they agreed to use an engine that didn't even allow for a functional jump. 

"Pre-CU Wasn’t that Good"

Pre-CU was that good for a ranger-miner like me.  No other game made mining fun, the way you explored and sampled, then put a thumper down to collect the almost infinate variety of resources.  In Pre-CU it was fun to mine, in any other game mining is a grind.  Any other game, you name it, resource mining is a grind.

To the OP:

Yeah, it had bugs.  Yeah, certain templates were far superior than others.  Yeah, jedi was a long grind. 

But to say it "wasn't that good"......well there's about 200,000+ people who will disagree with you.

The PRE CU was a great game, or rather a game with great potential.

Yet the way this game was programmed made it hard to impossible to do any major changes withour severly messing up the code aswell as gameplay.

I think if SOE and Lucasart had managed to integrate all the nice content they made, into the old game I would still be a paying customer.

Now, I will never again be a SOE customer.

Originally posted by Nebless

And neither is NGE. Face it, it’s time for both sides to take off the rose-colored glasses and admit that SWG; be it orig/pre/post or whatever was and is a flawed game. Which one is more flawed? Can’t say, that’s so subjective as to fall into the ‘how many digits can you take Pi to?’ argument. Which IS more playable? Hands down its NGE; BECAUSE it’s the only one SOE now offers. IF SOE offered both pre & post versions than you could argue which one, but they don’t.

A lot of players voted with their dollars when NGE came out and it didn’t seem to have as much or enough effect. Will anything down the road? Who knows?

So on that happy thought let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at some of the flaws in both...

- Professions
Old
32 skills. Be all you can be, how ever you wanted to be. Except there quickly became THE template everyone just had to have to be the best. So you can say 32 different, but the reality was a bunch of template clones

New
9 choices. Some variation, but not enough

- Jedi
Old
Super hard to get (way too hard?), the fix: holocron’s. You finally unlocked it? Now take a number and wait for the old man to come get you and take you to the super secret training village. I was all for only having a few in game, but they just handled it in such a strange way.

New
Starter profession, now it’s way too easy

- Leveling
Old
Level grinding and even worse macro level grinding. Camp a good NPC spawn point, set up your macro, go to bed and wake up the next day with a shiny new high level toon. Or go out and slaughter so much wildlife that PETA would drop dead from the shock.

New
Quest level grinding. One size fits all professions, factions and flavors. Some good stories, some bad, some really bad.

- Clutter
Old
Housing everywhere you could think of. The Theed and Moinia Vendor lines. The Valley of the Lag between Bestine and AH.

New
It’s still there except it’s just a dead world.

- Broken things
Old
Broken/nerf’d story lines, professions and missions. ‘I went there, where’s the NPC?’, Carbineer, mission points inside buildings.

New
Left over animations, crafting lines, missions. If you’re going to put in new, clean out the old! Mission points still inside buildings.

- Canon
This would pop up from time to time usually in the context of ‘we can’t do that, it’s not canon’.
Old
Mummer thugs, fighting pets

New
All the Clone Wars marketing tie in’s

And we could go on and on. Both games have their problems. I’d say NGE’s are worse if only because they have so many pre-NGE one’s they didn’t clean up.

Something I personally think, is that WE the players helped to screw up the pre-NGE game. Why?

- Buffing a level 1 to the max, outfitting him in the best comp armor around and running him through the hard missions to level him up fast. And then whining that the game needed more and more harder high level stuff to ‘challenge’ them. This is where the DWB and Corvette came from. No one wanted to take their time and just play at a lower level, everyone just HAD to be max’d out.

And because the dev’s were stuck in this rat race of coming up with new challenging stuff, they blew off the low level bugs and nerf’s since players were just blowing by them anyway, so why fix them. How often did we hear the mantra ‘X profession is nerf’d; we’ll fix it next build’ and it would just get pushed farther and farther back? How far? I think they were hoping so far back that people just forgot about it.

So in the end what did we end up with? I’d have to say two totally different games. SOE should have just given SWG:NGE a different name. Linking it to the old was one of the biggest dis-services they could have done.

 

aye, it just goes to show that even when they develop a good game system (the underlying system) they will screw it up some other way...  I still say to this day that the two best character development systems were SWG (original) and AO...  both of which flopped for reasons other than their character development systems...

Originally posted by Dkevlar

Originally posted by Abrahmm

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).

 

Well considering you completely made all of that up to justify cutting the entire population in half, I'll throw in that the majority of people I knew in game only had one account, and only a few had multiple accounts. Therefore 250k is pretty accurate.

But if we want to use your logic, then we can apply it to the NGE. Cut the current population in half, the current actual number of real people playing is is 41.

 

The majority of the people i knew in eclipse in the good old days had at least 2 accounts, but the magic 250k players number is a fair accessment since (i'll come back to the 250 000 in a bit), IMO, at his peak SWG had about 500 000 accounts (notice accounts)

Still, it is worth pointing out that even before the NGE, or even before the CU, numbers had dropped considerably. SWG foruns then were a mess with ravaging complaints about imbalances, like defence stackers, or the fact that a several buffs (food, spice, medical and entertainer) had become essential to do almost anything in the game, or broken story arcs, of the lack of loot (yes, lack of loot),  and many other things.

I, for example, stopped playing ~3 months before the CU . And was not the only one.  "it's dead jim" comes to mind when I remember that period.

And yes, pre-cu should have evolved. And the evolution was the CU and then NGE (that was a bloody mess ).  

The golden question is, even if they had done it differently, would those 250 000 still be playing the game?

Reality check: last years have show that themepark mmo's are more profitable than sandbox ones. I like sandbox more, but I am not blind. the current "console mentality players" reject the idea of a sandbox game

console mentality player - aka as the masses, the ones that make or kill a game when faced with a sandbox mmo:

huh? wtf is this?  I have to think now to play huh? here's the map pointing out where the quest givers and quest areas are? where the boss? where is the epic items? ARRRGH I want my highway to Overpowerness and a GPS -

 250 k players or 500 k accounts was a good number for a time where mmo's were a new thing, probably equivalent to today's 2 million players. Yet the peak population that swg had in it's  CU time was bypassed by wow in a glimpse- a cartoonish themepark game. 

 

 

So much truth in that.

Even if I play it today (free 33 days) I still must say Pre-CU was better.

Why?

• More professions. 32 down to 9... wtf happen?
• Jedi was hard to become and it gave me something to work on. And players that was Jedi where for me special. Today they are just boring.
• The game had one of the best looking animations I have ever seen. And I'm a person that enjoy looking at my character when he fights and I didn't use marco.
• The SW world was better. It had the old SW stuff in it. Today we have a big mix of it all and I don't know what time we are in. Some old armour then boom we have new.. it's a mess and it look just wierd. So again it was better Pre-CU and before Lucas gave us the other 3 movies... when I think about it... I think the new movies killed SWG!
• And Pre-Cu there was fun PvP. Fights all over the galaxie.
• And there was hunts. Sure you had to do a lot, but I had fun. I found new people every day and got new friends all over the world. Today? Well I just run around solo... most people are AFK or they just sit and show of armour or the meditation...

Totally agree, of the two versions I would still rather be playing pre-cu too. 

Granted there are parts or concepts of the NGE game that are good and would have made a nice addition to the original game.  I think the best thing to come along to date is the Appearance tab concept.  Wear your armor underneath but give yourself a totally different clothes look.  Great idea.  But over all, not really.