As cynical and jaded as I am, I think the reason they brought it back was the outcry from the playerbase over it's cancellation.

I think they truly had no idea that people would react the way they did and their visions of making more money on monthly subs versus the special offers was replaced by fear and terror that all those people posting the "I just cancelled my preorder ... " would actually do it.

*puts his pointy foil hat back on* No, no no. It was all a scam to get more people to jump on the bandwagon and buy a lifetime sub!

What truly boggles my mind is how it seems as if every new game that comes out is being "produced" by companies run by people that don't play games themselves. Maybe I should narrow that down to the people that hold the purse strings.

The movie "Groundhog Day" comes to mind. They live in that type of world that's the same day repeating over and over and they keep trying different things and not realizing that the outcome will be the same.

These people appear to have one thing in mind and only one thing, money. Regardless of common sense or their programmers or whomever telling them the idea is a bad one, they think it'll make them a few more dollars and they go with it.

For example, pushing a game out too early. How many times has that caused a game to do poorly or even to cause it to fail completely? Yet these people continue to do it. Another biggie to me is alienating and/or pissing off your customers by poor communication or lack of communication completely. SWG is THE prime example of both of these. It was pushed out too early, but it was able to recover. It continued on a while longer before it alienated and pissed off it's customers by totally ignoring their wishes/needs. Like an airplane that takes off with too little fuel and a rookie pilot who just got his license by reading "Flying Planes For Dummies". It might take off, it might fly a little while but it's destined to crash and burn.

Sadly I think that Champions Online is rolling down the same runway. Before the game has even been released Cryptic has managed to alienate and anger a large chunk of it's potential playerbase with the whole Lifetime Subscription fiasco. People hate to feel like they've been deceived, they also hate to think that a company that makes a product they enjoy doesn't care about their feelings.

Where do these guys think the money comes from? They act as if there's this huge pool of money and since Blizzard figured out a way to tap it, they can too. I've got news for you guys, it's not by running that huge pipe across the backs of your customers.

A lot of you are missing the point. Blizzard OWNS WoW and everything in it. You agreed to that when you clicked on the I Agree button after scrolling down and not reading the EULA. You are paying Blizzard to play the game and you are, for lack of a better word, leasing your account(s). If at any time you decide you want to do something against the EULA you risk losing access because you broke Blizzard's "law" and therefore they can punish you by suspension, ban, etc.

So someone who is making a living by helping people violate that AND don't forget they can probably show how it hurts other innocent customers which in turn hurts Blizzards business is asking for trouble. Just because you get away with something for a while, even though you know it's wrong, doesn't mean you aren't going to get caught sooner or later. Blizzard has DEEP pockets and that means big fancy law firms with eight names on the sign that live for squashing people's nuts and billing $1200/hr for the privilege.

BlizardLawyer casts Wrath of the High Dollar Legal Team on himself!

BlizzardLawyer crits BotMaker for 235000 damage!

Botmaker is dead!

Botmaker's group attempts to flee in fear!

BlizzardLawyer yells, "You shall not evade me!"

BlizzardLawyer casts Big Money Greed on Botmaker's group!

BotMaker's group begins to bleed money profusely!

Botmaker's group has fallen down and can't get up.

Botmaker's group has bled five gazzilion dollars!

Botmaker's group is no more!

Am I disappointed that the game was delayed? Yes. Am I angry about it? No. There's plenty of other things to play.

Saying it would be released in Q2 2008 was not giving a date for release, but instead a time frame when they expected to be able to release. Just like saying Fall of 2008 could be Sept, Oct and maybe even Nov. That's not giving a set date but instead an estimate. Giving an estimate and then changing it is one thing, giving a specific date and then pushing it back is another.

Think about it like this, you take your car to the shop to get fixed and they tell you that it will be ready in 15 minutes because they know it'll make you happy. In 15 minutes they tell you that it'll take another 20 minutes and they keep doing that for two days. You'd be angry as hell! But if they are up front and say that they aren't sure how long it'll take but should be ready in a couple of days. They call you in a day and say it's going to take longer. You are upset but not  near as upset as you were in the first scenario.

I respect them for not giving a specific date but instead an estimated release time even though they realize it's going to upset people. These guys are building something that could very well determine whether they have jobs two years from now. I'd be really careful to get it right before I released it too.
 Responsibilty ultimately rests with the leader for a failed project and it seems Mark Jacobs is determined to make sure things go like they should and deliver a quality game.

If they are saying the same thing this time next year I'll figure this was all just a scam to get more pre-order money.

I'm looking forward to the game, regardless of when it releases. However, I'm not going to pre-purchase a game with no set release date. Yes I realize that even a "set" date can change, but I have never liked feeling like I'm just giving someone my money for something they won't give me until "it's ready".
Would you pay someone to mow your lawn if they said they would do it sometime while the grass is still growing? Oh but they'll give you a sign to put up that says "Lawn cutting coming soon!" and a promise that you'll be one of the first to get yours trimmed!

My first response to seeing the article was to check the date on it. Is this not the same patch they've been talking about for months? I guess polls showed that people were starting to let other shiny things draw their attention away from yet another boring WoW announcement. So let's make a new wallpaper, plaster some uber-cool demon looking dude around the edges of the page and call it NEW news!

You want news? New, exciting, make your hind leg quiver news? Well then here's a peek at some of the next patches notes, coming "soon"!

• New arena stuff! ...blah blah blah
• More new arena changes! ...blah blah blah
• Exciting new class changes in the arena...blah blah blah
• New exciting and cool plastic toy! Coming soon to a McD's happy meal! *based on the arena characters from the winning 3v3 team in the Western Phillipines Pacific Tournament*
• more 5man badge collecting places...blah blah blah
• hand-me-down loot from three arena seasons ago will be available for purchase using gold, honor and leather scraps! So start your farming early!
• More mucking around with the tired old BG's...blah blah blah
• AV balance changes! Both starting caves now just open up into a giant ARENA! But not just any arena! An arena with...SNOW!
• A new collectable pet available as a Faction quest reward! Become exalted with every faction in the game, pay 250,000 gold, 325,000 honor and 255 of each BG token to claim your exciting new pet, the pink vorpal bunny! Click on him repeatedly and he says cute and funny things like "Stop poking me!" "ow! my balls!" "pass the gravy!" Click on him too many times and he just might jump up and tear your throat out with his teeth! Just like all your friends want to do after you waste 30 minutes of their lives talking about your faction grinding!

Drak

PS. Please don't message me asking for the name and location of the NPC that gives the Vorpal Bunny quest. I've been sworn to secrecy.

Since FPS means First Person Shooter that means AoC is going to have guns AND nipples!

All I can say is ... Best ... idea ... EVER ... for an MMO!

It'll get bumped from WalMart anyway once the politicians find out about the top secret Hot Mead mod and start wailing "Save our children!"

JYCowboy:  "This is different from most mmo's as its a licence taken from another company on an existing franchise or world like Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Lord of the Rings, Conan, Dungeons and Dragons, Transformers, Robotech, Knight Rider, Buck Rogers, The Six Million Dollar Man, G.I. Joe, Gunsmoke, Gilligan's Island, etc. etc. etc."

Whoah! Sweet! A Gilligan's Island MMO??

Who is developing it? SOE? I hope not, otherwise I'd happily pay $14.95 a month to indulge in the Mary Ann fantasies from my youth.

Ok, call me cynical, but how is one hour going to make it easier to catch gold sellers/buyers? Do they have live people that monitor each and every mailbox transaction and they need more time to do it due to a recent large number of layoffs in Blizzard's Mail Censorship & Monitoring Dept? Come on. I'm sure they are already logged and anything that is suspicious based on certain factors gets flagged for review. Those reports are then read over and further action is taken as needed. This job, the wholesale slaughter and destruction, um, the catching and burning at the stake, oh I mean, the apprehension and prosecution of gold sellers and other TOS violating scum  should be done with the smallest impact on the decent TOS-abiding PAYING customers.

Is the one hour going to inconvenience me? Probably not. I just hate to see companies taking the "shotgun" approach, making sweeping game-wide changes that affect everyone playing the game, to catch and/or punish a minority of the overall playerbase. Blizzard has a track record of being overzealous when it comes to enforcing it's TOS.

Shhh...Hear that high pitched squealing sound? That's the sound of some poor shmoe who just got wrongfully banned for sending gold from his AH toon on his first account to his main on his other account. It's already happened I'm sure and now it'll probably just happen more often. I seriously doubt that anything they do can and will stop gold-selling completely, short of shutting down the game, so why not just use the tools you already have to catch the violators and get busy adding more content or maybe working on the next expansion? Oh wait, I forgot. All Blizzard employees not answering the phone or making coffee are working on Starcraft 2.

Originally posted by AbasiMalone

For 20 bucks you can get the Complete Online set that includes the original game and all the expansions. If you do the trial, you don't get your free 30 days.  Approaching the game from a fresh perspective, it's actually pretty good. All of the negative posts are from the pre CU fanbois. I'm not suggesting they don't have a reason to be pissed, it's just that coming from a non biased perspective(which is not possible in this thread) it's a good game. I was sucked right in. There are plenty of Elder players. I bet most of the whiners on here still have an account LOL.

Tee-hee! You so funny!

You can do a lot of things with $20 and a fresh perspective. That doesn't mean I want to do any of them.

You started playing SWG what? About 3 weeks ago? And you consider yourself a veteran? Or did you just not realize you were in the Veterans Refuge when you posted? The game you're playing right now, running around as Darth Womprat the level 96 Dark Jedi is not the same game that we "Elder Pre-CU fanbois whiners" played.  I'm happy that you enjoy playing the steaming pile of cow dung that happens to currently carry the Star Wars Galaxies title. If you hang around long enough you just might become worthy of being called an "Elder whiner" when they completely change the game again.

I'm betting it won't be long before they add Ewoks as a playable race. Ewoks appeal to the age bracket they want playing their game. It's the same ones that enjoy it now.

You have to learn to read Dev-Speak. To begin you must put yourself in the mindset of a SWG Dev. 

Repeat this to yourself five times: "You are the greatest. No one is better than you. You are smarter and better looking than all of the dirty peons that pay you money for the privilege of playing your game and reading your enlightened posts."

Now go back and read that paragraph and see what jumps out at you like it did me: 

"Secondly, many of us are just plain philosophically opposed to the idea."

Now does that not just ooze arrogance. "WE are opposed to it for purely philosophical reasons, so that means that YOU don't get to have things your way. Who do you think you are?? A paying customer?"

Some things never change. From day one there were two excuses that you'd hear from the Devs about why something couldn't be done. 1) It wasn't technologically possible or 2) It was against their vision aka philosophy aka crack smoking induced hallucination, of how the game should be. Pardon me, but I think I remember learning in like the 6th grade that to be successful a company has to please it's customers. I don't care about your vision or your philosophy! I don't care if you think Trandoshans are just Wookies with their hair shaved! I'm a paying customer, me and about 250k other people, and we want the game left alone. We don't want it changed, we want it FIXED. So why in the name of all that's holy do you think we'll keep playing and more importantly PAYING, if you keep telling us what we want is impossible and to just suck it up and stop crying?

Originally posted by Kryogenic

I remeber starting with a knife, a melon, and a CDEF Pistol. Droids weren't in back then, the shuttle and starport wait times were long, there were no vehicles, no JtLS, but it was the most fun I'd had playing a video game. I remeber playing instruments at the Starport and getting donations from people while I played. I loved the fact that it felt like we had an online world in which to interact with each other. It was great.

I played SWG just about everyday until the NGE hit. I saw all kinds of changes in the game and I'd have to say that I liked the CU the best. I loved the way SWG was right before the NGE hit. Granted, I wasn't too happy with the way they made Kashyyk sectioned off in places you couldn't travel and Mustafar was stupid (Why in the hell couldn't you take a direct route over the mountians like on every other planet. Dumb ass invisibile walls). I loved flying my ETA-2 Actis Interceptor around too.

Old school SWG promoted fellowship, comeradery, and something more than just grinding and PvPing. It had whats been missing from every single MMO to date.

I hate SOE and refuse to play any game they are involved with, but I'd be a lier if I said I wouldn't come back to SWG if they brought back even just one server without that God awful NGE bullshit.

I agree with you 99.9%. Where you and I differ is that I wouldn't EVER go back to a game that SOE had anything to do with. Period.

I started playing with the beta. I played pretty much non-stop. I even took a break to go try WoW with some friends and just reduced my SWG time before I tired of WoW and went back to SWG full time. When I quit playing for good I turned off a total of four accounts. That was after the NGE.

I was one of the few that actually didn't think the CU was all that bad. I preferred the game before the CU yes, but I wasn't going to quit the game because of it. I stuck it out and made the best of it. The NGE to me was like logging out of SWG one night and logging back in the next day to some beta test of a Star Wars game for the XBox. People said it was because they wanted to appeal to younger gamers. They wanted to make it more of a "twitch" game. They took the Role Playing Game out of MMORPG and made a whole new genre. I call it MMOASS. Massive Multiplayer Online Arcade Shooter Shat. If I want to play a twitch game that requires a game pad I'll go get on the XBox 360 or the Playstation. I had stuck it out through numerous bad gameplay changes, nerfs, buggy patches, bugs that were around since beta that never got fixed and an arrogant attitude from the Devs that came across to me like we needed them more than they needed us. The NGE was just the final slap in the face that was too much to handle. I'm a customer, a paying customer and if you don't want my business, as much as I love your product and would very much like to keep paying for it, I'm not going to. I'm not going to keep listening to your seemingly daily feel-good BS letters to the playerbase blowing sunshine up my butt. I didn't fall off the turnip shuttle yesterday. Fool me 450 times, shame on you. Fool me 451 times, shame on me! I'll take my $60 a month and go find someone else to give it to that just might be better at convincing me that I'm truly an appreciated customer.

Some bonehead in an office somewhere at SOE with the power to make or break the game decided he'd rather watch the game fail than admit he'd made a huge blunder with the NGE and roll the game back. So if you're hoping that will happen and you can get back in line to give SOE your hard earned money, I'm sorry. Real Sorry. I hate to tell you but the game you and I loved is gone. Forever.