WoWize:

To make like WoW

Examples: replacing all the task bar buttons from symbolic barebones graphics to cartoony WoWlike graphics

An overt, in your face level system.  One where if you fight something too far below your level, you get no XP to speak of, and if you try something too high above your level, it's instant death.  The old system a rancor hit for what a rancor hits, regardless of your status, without tailoring its damage based on your level (higher raw damage to lower levels, lower raw damage to higher levels).  In the CU system a level 50 rancor was trivial to defeat by a level 80 toon, regardless of the skillset.  This was simply not the case in the old system, where you brought along a melee toon to tank and the ranged players did the damage, because for a ranged toon to take on a rancor solo was problematic without armor and buffs.

Creation of directed quest content to level your character

Restricting the level of mobs by planet, much as is done in zones in WoW.  The tutorial station, very much like the newbie zones.  In fact, even more restricted, as high level players can't go there. Tatooine: newbie word, sort of the equivalent of Westfall or the Barrens...with the one exception of level 80+ Krayt dragons and some level 30 Tusken raiders, albeit in out of the way places.  On to Naboo, sort of the equivalent of Duskwood, or Ashenvale, or Stonetalon.  Mustafar and to some extent distant from the outposts Dathomir being the high end equivalent of flyover country between Stormwind and Ironforge, or the Plaguelands.

With the NGE, they just tossed aside skill based characters for class based, just like WoW.

The "expertise" system, which is a pretty direct rip-off of talents.

Jeez, they've even screwed up the mounts so they can't exist in the world unless you're riding them...just like WoW.

Here you go...

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/posts/list.m?&topic_id=363263

No telling how long it will be there.  The thread is three pages long now, lots of skepticism, understandably.

However, I remind you all of the post that "couldn't be true" about Jedi becoming a starting profession back in October 2005...

Originally posted by duncan_922
Actually, I think it's pretty safe to say that it all went downhill the first time Smedley looked at WoW's subscription numbers and got a hard-on!

ROFL...all too true.

Much of this has to do with WoW envy.

SWG has always been a collaborative effort between Lucas Arts and SOE.  SOE can't "give the game back" to LA...LA has always called the shots, SOE is more like the administrator of the operation, beholden to LA's creative whims.

LA held up the FRS.  LA supposedly was not happy with the lack of a "starwarsy" feel of much of the game.

LA was green with envy of WoW's amazing success.  Well, SOE was, too.  Which is why the decision to "WoWize" the game was made.

With LA and SOE, it's about the benjamins, first and foremost.

"The Sandbox" was not the problem.  If it were the problem, then non-sandbox games (like WoW) would never have griefing going on, would never see player bans.

The problem was the game  was (and is) rife with bugs and exploits.  Some players will look for any seam they can find and rip it apart, and gleefully grief other players.  It's the nature of the beast, and the anonymity of the MMO allows for a lot of antisocial behavior.

Also, frankly, I think the beta testers (and I was one of them) were not as aggressive in attempting to do things not "as intended" to really stress the game and find those seams.

One of SWG's early problems was that the central direction (aka Raph Koster) was kicked upstairs and out of the way almost the instant the game went live.

Without his vision, and with no apparent individual or even team with a solid vision of what was to happen, the game lost all direction and flailed about with no one on the rudder.

It was obvious the game was released too early, most of the high end content (and with SWG, the skill system WAS the content) was not tested, for both combat and crafting, and as a result the game went gold still well into beta and not ready for prime time.   This lack of testing gave us the huge problems of CHs running amok, which resulted in all critter mobs being nerfed, which made the combination of composite armor and doc buffs rendering players invincible in PvE and making it suicide to engage in PvP without them.

Of course the issue of holocrons and how it shifted the attention of much of the player base to profession grinding to get their glowstick has been covered.  This is part of the gordian knot of SWG; the battle between gameplay and marketing, and marketing (which wanted Jedi, because Jedi = $$$) won.

I suspect that the recent vet trial didn't result in the number of renewed accounts that LA was looking for, and it's finally set in that the NGE was a huge mistake, that they're never going to catch up with WoW because, let's face it, WoW is the ultimate 2nd Gen MMO, having taken advantage of seeing where others stumbled and avoiding the pratfalls.

Also, they've figured out that what they want to do is go back to a game design that DOES encourage loyalty, which is what they had before.  WoW just does not have that, it does get boring after a while.

Originally posted by Raven99
What's  become of this game is its the perfect game now for those whom want everything handed to them. It's nearly impossible to even die in this game anymore. If you want to get killed in combat you have to basically work for it. It's a gravy game now. The ones whom enjoy this game IMO are the ones you see in all the games asking for the answer, and solution to every quest in a game without having to work for it, or even giving it a try themselves.

There that's my bias and i'm sticking to it,

Raven

This is all quite true.  Death has absolutely no sting at all, aside from the annoyance of having to return to where you died from the cloner.

What is even more amazing to me is that even though if you work your way through the Legacy quest series, you'll be a millionaire off the credit rewards and cashing in the endless stream of junk loot, new players are still standing around Mos Eisley begging for credits.

The live game is nearly as free with handing out credits as the blue frogs are on TC!

Originally posted by Stellos

Doesn't matter what the "alpha" class is; the OP is correct there are more Jedi than anything else.  Just because there is a class that is better doesn't mean everyone chooses that class.  In fact I would bet that all those Commandos out there have a Jedi:)  I'm bummed too.  Becoming a Jedi should of been REDICULOUSLY difficult, as was the intentions pre-release. 

KOTOR Online anyone?

Ahem....

OK, so my CU Jedi (who went into pub 9 with 2 'free' trees is an NGE Jedi

And my unlock toon is a Commando...

But my Jedi toon DID master Commando (holocron told him to!)...

But, yeah, I strongly suspect that 8 out of 10 new players choose Jedi as their class.  They're wearing those damn paddy robes EVERYWHERE....

I wish they'd bring back Jedi visiblity...

Let's take a look at just one aspect of how Blizzard operates:

The expansion, the Burning Crusade.

Delayed after the holiday season because...shudder and utterly unthinkable at LA or SOE...it wasn't ready to go yet!

Blizzard is gamers making games that make them money.

SOE and LA are business types looking to make money through gaming.

Originally posted by irukandji
...the new and exciting Beastmaster. Current Forum seems to be loving it. I'll give them 4 months. Anyone else want to prognosticate on the probable nerf?

I was glancing at the Game Play forum, and there are already players whining that Beast Master is overpowered, that we're in for a new round of "Pet Wars", etc.

La plus ca change....

Originally posted by hubertgrove

3/. SOE not only refuses to listen to those who communicate with them but insults those who even use the official channels. Twice now, SOE rperesentatives have indicated that those who post on the game's official forums are not represenative of the opinions and views of those who play the game. 'Only 10% of players post here', they say, 'The rest play the game [and by implication are perfectly happy]'. Those idiots never understood a basic rule of corporate coms; that the percentage of views expressed by representatives of a larger body is the same as the percentage within the larger body itself. SOE's policy towards posters trying to express their feelings, suggestions and views was insulting. At best, such communications were ignored and, at worst, penalised by bannings and suspensions.

I was in a PA with perhaps 50 members in it, but I was far and away the most vocal member of that guild in the fora.  There were perhaps 10 or so others who posted frequently in the fora but none of them got even close to my post level or visiblity level in the Ahazi galaxy forum, or for that matter in the Creature Handler forum or a number of other profession fora.

Yet I can honestly say that I was expressing a group consensus about the game, and I was one of the "vocal minority" that SOE chose to blow off as "unrepresentative".

The NGE killed my PA.  All but one member of the PA left the game, and that one member only stayed because of space, and that WoW's world was unappealing to him ("I can't be a damn elf!").  The PA reformed over at WoW, but it's never been quite the same, even with new folks joining us that never played SWG, I think in part because WoW is simply not SWG.

Originally posted by Caswell

"If your Jedi is having visibility issues, please check your video card drivers."

Oh man oh man is that the classic CSR response.

I recall once being told by a CSR that the solution to the Warren key giver being stuck in a tree was to toss up a camp to make the tree go away.

The tree, of course, was located in a "metropolitan area" where you can't erect camps.

D'oh!

The OP missed one important lie, but unless the OP was a CU alpha tester, would not know it.

In November of 2004, with great fanfare, it was announced that a number of players would be participating in a CU sandbox program.  The promise was that actual players would help shape the CU.

The problem was, the players who participated never set foot in the sandbox to help shape the CU.  Oh, they saw all the CU documents before everyone else did, and they got to post to a special forum to discuss the proposed CU changes, but they never got to play with the CU until it was put on Test Center.

So the entire CU sandbox, the "Alpha Tester" program, was a sham.  A canard.

A lie.

The CU that was actually foisted on the SWG community bore very little resemblance to the documents I was permitted (under pain of NDA death) to read in late 2004.  The CU I saw probably would have worked.  But WoW came on the scene, took the industry by storm, and the numbers that were being racked up meant that Smedley and the rest of his MBA crew were simultanously pwned and mesmerized by those guys at Blizzard.

And so all the innovation of SWG was chucked in favor of slavish imitiation of WoW, except for the two things that really made WoW shine:

1.  Relatively bug-free play

2.  Responsive customer service.

I've read the thread, and the description of what the pre-CU was has been pretty much laid out.

What the original game did was create a community, and that's what is most painfully missing from the current phase of the NGE.  I participated in the vet trial a month back, and while the world was still there, and the gameplay was sort of still there, the community that the original SWG fostered was irreparably destroyed by the NGE.  The CU didn't quite do it, but it made a huge dent in it.  The NGE finished it off.

The community was why I (and many other people) put up with the bugs, with the imbalances (which were, as someone pointed out above, more often than not because some professions were less broken than others), with the inherent problem that the desires of PvP players in gameplay directly conflict with the desires of PvE players, and the developers have to deal with both groups.

What made the community great was that it brought Star Wars fans together and you had this geeky communal experience that was endlessly entertaining, and it was not dependent on the developers to make it that way.  Then through SOE/LA's intense desire to be just like WoW without doing the two things that WoW most had going for it...relatively bug-free play and responsive customer service...they destroyed the community.  WoW's community is NOTHING like the SWG pre-CU community.  There's no interdependency like SWGs, not when you can solo your way to the top in WoW.  SWG early on, to attempt to solo anything outside of the yard trash mobs around the cities was to invite death.  You really DID need to group up to do things, and that's what made it fun.  Futhermore, you didn't have to be combat oriented to have fun.

But then SOE decided that they knew more about what your fun was than you did, and, well, they've got the subscription numbers to show just how right they were in taking that tack.