Originally posted by jonawiki

Well, I think the article has improved substantially now. More sourcing and more editorial balance. But it's fascinating the extent to which SWG fanbois and ex-employees (like Jeff Freeman) will go in order to quash any ugly truth at every turn. It's truly an unfortunate propaganda war. :(

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

Originally posted by Aikes

Originally posted by ShiloFields
It seems to have disappeared?  I don't see where it was even locked?

Someone probably shat their pants when the news articles being listed were all agreeing with the majority of the negative feedback from the Pre-Combat Dumb-down community.

Isn't it funny that even after MMORPG provides a "Veteran SWG" area that we are still not to speak openly as a community or debate certain core issues that define our existence?

It is even funnier that people who completely disagree with majority Veteran views are allowed to come to the Veteran area and hound us while this area was created to keep us out of the current SWG community area so that we don't get in the way of positive feedback, if such exists.

Originally posted by Volarian
 Developers are suppose to love what we love....or we wouldn't want to play their games.

Originally posted by Dvol

I just want to know when im going to get a new game thats not a clone of EQ or WoW.

Uhm… Soon!

Seriously, we’re going to have a flood of all sorts of different MMOs. Not even all MMORPGs, some may provoke arguments as to whether they are real MMOs. Or even as to whether they are real games.

There’s a crazy amount of MMO diversity in Asia, and anything not coming here directly, is going to be influencing the games being made here. Then those other games’ sequels will come here, too.

Some of the same ‘ol, but some different stuff.

Even if you personally avoid MMO console games, you’ll still benefit from the gameplay examples they set for PC MMOs. Some new, different things will come of that, even without just straight copying the console gameplay.

And with straight copying? Well that’s still an improvement over just the one thing we have to copy now.

Of course there will also be other games. Little things, briefly entertaining, many even online (just almost in that special way we like, but not quite). Though merely distractions to pass time while we wait for a non-clone MMO, they can be enjoyable online activities.

Some may even be more fun than griefing Wikipedia, if not quite as sticky.

Annnnnd… Well, do you like pirates?

This year it’s all pirates. Somewhere between 4 and 37 pirate MMOs rolling out, since that was the unique idea for an MMO that everyone embraced two or three years ago when all their Viking MMOs were canceled.

After pirate-year…

The Eve Online devs are not going to make a stock-MUD, tanker-nuker-healer, three-diku World of Darkness game. There’s just no way, no how. Impossible. I refuse to entertain the thought. Shup!

That one is less than a half-decade away, still practically riding on the heals of the 80’s Vampire-chic fad, when you consider how long Vampires live.

Ok, so otherwise, maybe there will be some WoW-clone failures, and some Second Life-like flops, and possibly a revelation some day that there are so not millions of people really playing… one of those two.

And on top of that, this:

Wonderland quotes Raph Koster as saying:

I would say we are about to see a truly massive explosion in the quantity of online worlds, like Korea saw. The vast majority will not be retail box products. We’re starting to see… you saw darkstar just open sourced a perfectly viable MMO engine. You can pick it up for free. We’re going to start to see a helluva lot more… stuff.

So there’s a bright future out there, just over the horizon at the very spot your superstitious pirate-crew believes the ocean runs off the edge of the earth, down into the mouths of monsters. A bright future indeed (in spite of the fact that your crew may be correct in their beliefs, it being a videogame ocean and all).

Not today, but someday, Game and World will meet. They’ll fall in love, or at least settle, and have some normal kids.

Not tomorrow or the next day, either.

Old-timers - as we will all be by then - might even fail to recognize normal when we see it. Odds are stacked against us, we who jumped the gun, started playing MMOs before they were even good.

Originally posted by Wildcat84

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Originally posted by Dundee

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Originally posted by tfwarlord

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On the one hand, I'm glad you're directing your anger toward the company, rather than a handful of the employees working on some part of the project at the time, or soon after.

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Ofcause i dont think anyone is really pissed at the CSRs, or the DEVs, its only the company and the bosses we are angry at..

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Oh, no... there are some people really pissed at me.

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You say this as if there is no reason for it.

I do have a serious question for you though:

Do you think the NGE was, in retrospect, a mistake (which you seem to be saying) because:

A. It killed the game because it shafted long time players who loved a completely different game.

B. It sucked on it's own merits, wasn't fun, and was years away from being a legitimate, release quality product

You see, I still think you are equivocating, just like Smed and company who still cling to thinking that the NGE wasn't a mistake, it was the badly handled PR that was the mistake.

What you seem to be saying is that the NGE was a mistake, but only because it was done to an already established game, that had it been SWG to begin with, it'd have worked and been a great idea.

Originally posted by tfwarlord

On the one hand, I'm glad you're directing your anger toward the company, rather than a handful of the employees working on some part of the project at the time,  or soon after.

Ofcause i dont think anyone is really pissed at the CSRs, or the DEVs, its only the company and the bosses we are angry at..

Originally posted by Wildcat84

Personally, I cost Sony about $30K worth of plasma screens and DVD players alone when my company was looking to roll out a videoconferencing setup. I took Sony out of the bid spec for the screens and the DVD players we bought (they were originally there). We bought another brand (RCA).

The moral of the story: Don't piss off the geeks. We wield a LOT more power than you suits believe.

I can understand not having a marketing department, but clearly SOE is greatly lacking in public relations/customer relations. All you have are some glorified forum mods called community managers. That's not good enough, there should be a senior position up in management in every suit meeting who represents customer relations.

That is how the veteran player base wasn't considered. There was no one in the NGE decision meetings who ever came into contact with players (or even those who do).

Still, I don't buy that theroy anyway, either the managers who made the NGE decision deliberately decided to throw away the customer base for a new, larger one, or they were incompetent. Or both. I vote both.

Originally posted by batgirl

PS . What are you working on now jeff? i can only imagine this whole experience has taught you alot , be nice to see what you have learned put into practice .

Originally posted by therain93

Originally posted by tfwarlord
Heeey, i just got a idea.... how about if we (us MMO vets who has been mistreated greatly by a mmo company), create a MMO Consumer Group (MCG). ofcause without any legal power, just a pure website, where companies who have mistreated a consumer by some way of the other, could be blacklisted. it would ofcause be desided By the managers and leaders of "MCG" if the company deserves to be blacklisted (so its only if they really deserve it, so all the worhless winers would be disregared ). This wouldent be hard to make, and if we get a big enough community, we mite even have some influance towards the mmo companies:

This would be a great idea -- at a minimum of 8.5 million players to represent (assuming Wow is the universe or mmorpg subscribers and any duplicate accounts would count for those who don't play wow) that would be a tremendous consumer advocacy group.

Originally posted by tfwarlord
ehhh jeff, speaking from a marketing kinda view, if a product is in the shitter, and only your real loyal customers stay, its never alright to sacrifice them.. it woulda alot better (and i mean alot) if you just shut the game down. you dont ever want to alienate your self from your loyal customers, becaues they are the ones that is easiest to transfer over to another product (Eq2, planetside etc etc...).
 you dont ever say "we dont care if we loose some of the veterans, if we MABY can get 10 times as many new customers".
 If a product has low and stil declining market share, and it is a small share of your company (SOE), you NEVER sacrifice your loyal veteran customers on a chance, YOU SHUT THE PRODUCT DOWN.. shit i learned this my 1st year at Business akademy.. no wonder Sonys market share is declining....

Me personally i have never feelt this betrayed, iv personally taken the stand that i will never buy another product in my life that is just alittle affiliated with sony (not just Sony Online Entertainment), no matter if its a CD-R, og a game.

You guys should really know something about simple marketing,

Originally posted by FikusOfAhazi

I think people are showing him the same decency he showed them back in '05. I know its sad, but, whats the Golden Rule again? Do unto others as.....

Originally posted by akevv

Here is something that I have never seen asked:

Was PlanetSide originally an engine developed for SWG?

Perhaps Jeff, this is what you are speaking of regarding the clicky style interface? What they gave us in SWG is an abomination, but what PlanetSide runs on is really fun, fast paced, runs great with dozens of players, and relatively easy to get back into the action upon a death...

Originally posted by kaibigan34
It would go over a hell of alot better then having you say "Yes" then it blowing it up in my face.......

I own a business. If I all of a sudden said "Hey lets stop selling fossils and sell novelty T-Shirts instead." and you said "Yes we can do that" then it backfired guess whose getting the axe? But if you said no and told me why then you would probably get a raise.

Originally posted by Kyler1138

So how did

"We can't do it.

We shouldn't do it."

Turn into 'This is going live as soon as we get done billing the current players for the expansion that had brand new creature handler stuff in it that we are removing two weeks later'

Originally posted by DarthRaiden

Originally posted by Vortex500

And Fast Action Combat and the introduction of classes based on iconic Star Wars character archtypes doesn't toss-out everything Koster-esque about Galaxies. Far from it.

"introduction of classes"  and form of  how "Fast Action Combat" finally implemented is  main reason made CU - NGE  a  failure.
Other reason is sure the feeling of  you  "lost anything" after you tried hard to progress your char.  After CU - NGE you found  yourself  "lost anything" gained in 2 years PLUS  you lost simply the "technical" (simple some things like profs  no longer existed) ability and motivation to earn back what you lost because just of  that  poorly implementation  of  "Fast Action Combat"  and "Classes".

Unlike what stated in the linked blog changing these 2 main  elements of the SWG  World  was like throwing  the vision of original developers out of  the window.

Originally posted by tillamook

  What is Jeff trying to accomplish by posting here? Anyone know? He of all people should know that SWG refugees and devs don't play nicely together yet he pretends to be surprised with some of the flack he gets in here.  Is this some kind of sick and twisted pleasure fulfillment for him, or is he just trying to make it look like it’s the SWG refugees who are totally unreasonable?

Originally posted by sempiternal

Originally posted by Vortex500

First off, Star Wars Galaxies is already a whole lot of fun for a whole lot of people. And it was very successful.

Next time keep your fat fingers for your own enjoyment rather than sticking them into than something that isn't broke, J.Freeman.

I'm very sorry for how that sounds.

It was written in response to some negative things non-SWG players were saying about Raph.

I know I came off sounding like I was taking credit for the NGE in a "I didn't do it, wink wink, nudge nudge" sort of way, but I was being literal there. It sounds like I "pushed it through", but again, I was being literal, not ironic, in reassuring that just one specific thing - clicky combat interface - was possible to do on a live server.. It sounds like I was talking about the entire NGE and every change in it, but I was speaking of just one specific thing: the clicky combat interface, which I found more fun than CU. I'll admit, I disliked CU, and I liked clicking to shoot the thing I clicked. I have also been told it sounds like I was saying that I myself believed that "removing the Raph" would make SWG better, but I wrote this as a response to people who were saying that. A retort. Not to say that myself.

Please don't take this to mean that I designed the NGE, pushed it all the way up to executives in both SOE and LEC, railroaded or bedaffled with bunkum 'til they were on board the crazy-train with me (I really don't have that sort of personality), then implemented it on my own computer and surprised the players with it out of wicked spite.

I do sincerely apologize for how insensitive this post was for you.

You yourself said you were the cheerleader for the nge. You said that you kept telling the powers that be that "we can do this".

No, I did not. I wasn't writing about the NGE, which is a massive number of changes. I never said that, others have said it about me.

The context in which the line you're taking to mean "I cheer-led the NGE" was first, not about "the NGE", it was about one of the changes which went in with all the rest of the NGE changes.. Second, the statement itself was my attempt to avoid taking credit for the combat interface style. Since I wasn't the one who made it, I didn't want co-worker s (any of them), reading my blog and thinking I was taking credit for their work. I designed and implemented very little of anything in the NGE, and I didn't want that blog post to come off as my taking credit for it all.

Well, no worries there. Turns out no one actually wanted credit for it.

But if you're going to tell people what I did and what I said, you could at least base it on my posts, rather than other peoples' posts about what they think my post said.

Originally posted by Obee

Because many players liked the deves they think "up and quit" and have your blog post where you say you had to convince "The Man" that the NGE combat system was too fun not to implement that makes them hope you were fired.

 You're the only dev who worked on part of the NGE that has admitted to having a role in it (and you're blog post made it seem like you were gung ho about the NGE, wether you intended it to or not).

Originally posted by Platonic
I've heard several positions from SOE on this, but I've never found any sort of complete answer.

The first reason is something that I read in an SOE developer discussion at Austin last year - http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10830

The number of subscriptions were falling.  Something drastic had to be done to save the game.  Was this true?

One of the most telling posts that you ever made on the SWG forums I could only understand in retrospect.  The post about the toilet in the middle of the living room was the NGE.  Regardless if you think a toilet should be in the middle of a living room, if the boss man says to build it, you do it.

Originally posted by Obee
Dundee was doing what others have already said, trying to come across as remorseful about the NGE, while not accepting any blame and trying to deflect any blame away from everyone who deserves it.

  When that didn't work like he thought it would, he changed to being more aggresive towards everyone who didn't swallow what he was pushing and began playing semantics as a dodge.

  We didn't actually learn anything more than we already knew, SOE did it, LucasArts approved it, and the players got screwed.  The whole, 'Nobody thought it would work' and 'Nobody was responsible' memes are pure BS meant to retroactively absolve everyone involved from blame.

True, we didn't lose anything, nor were we harmed, by Dundee's posting here, but we also didn't gain anything positive from it.  I don't think he did either.