Originally posted by Daffid011

I think the original poster correctly identifies the awkwardness of the email.

 

Due to the OVERWHEMLIMG SUCCESS of something, the results are server closures.   That is what they are saying.

 

The RESULT of something successful should not be something that is viewed as a sign of FAILURE. 

 

Your successful advertising campaign should not result in a decrees of sales.  Your successful new product should not result if mass layoffs.  I understand companies don't want to tell the ugly truth, but trying to act like this is some success story is just plain stupid.

 

 

They're not talking at ALL about the state of the game being a success.  They're talking about their character transfers.

Originally posted by vladakov

Originally posted by liberalguy

So I just got an email from SOE:

 

---

Dear Star Wars Galaxies™ Account Holder,
Due to the overwhelming success of the recent Free Character Transfer Service, we want to inform you that on October 15, 2009, at 5:00 PM PDT, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) will close the following 12 Star Wars Galaxies servers:
Corbantis
Europe-Infinity
Intrepid
Kauri
Kettemoor
Lowca
Naritus
Scylla
Tarquinas
Tempest
Valcyn
Wanderhome

---

 
Shouldn't that say "Due to the overwhelming failure of the NGE we want to inform you that on October 15,2009, at 5:00 PM PDT, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) will close the following 12 Star Wars Galaxies servers"?

 

Too bad about Intrepid, though, my home server will be no more.
 

are you even paying attention? he says the free character transfers are a succes. -.-'

reading comprehension is a lost art.

"Due to the overwhelming success of the recent Free Character Transfer Service"

This is part of what exactly the OP posted.  READ that and tell me that they are saying the state of their game being a success.  They're talking about their recent promotion of free character transfers that they can shut down 12 servers.

Originally posted by Vulnero87

"Due to the overwhelming success of the recent Free Character Transfer Service"

This is part of what exactly the OP posted.  READ that and tell me that they are saying the state of their game being a success.  They're talking about their recent promotion of free character transfers that they can shut down 12 servers.

You can't take just PART of the statement. "Due to the overwhelming success of the Free Character Transfer Service..."...what? What is happening due to that success? What is the result of that success? Closing half the games servers is simply not something any reasonable company would view as a "success".

Intrepid was my home for the first two + years I played the game.  Vaya con dios, old friend. Later when I came back to play off and on, I ended up on Bria, which still has a decent population on it.

Still waiting for another sandbox MMO to give me that freedom of expression, and awesome, intertwined community that I experienced in SWG.

Originally posted by TUX426

You can't take just PART of the statement. "Due to the overwhelming success of the Free Character Transfer Service..."...what? What is happening due to that success? What is the result of that success? Closing half the games servers is simply not something any reasonable company would view as a "success".

If the FCTS hadn't been used by the huge number of people that took advantage of it, the servers would not have closed.

The FCTS was a success because so many people used it.  If it had gone in and nobody had moved then it would have been deemed a failure.

Not really rocket science, and it's old news, but some people never pass up an opportunity to take a shot at SoE, even if they have to fail at reading comprehension to do so.

If you look at my recent population stats, you can see the drop off for the servers that were closed started with Chapter 6, where PvE difficulty was substantially increased over what is was after the NGE pretty much broke it. 

Players moved servers, either using the paid for CTS or rerolling, just so that they could find the groups required for the new difficulty. 

Thus started the great server population imbalance that we still see today.

Originally posted by demonic87

Originally posted by Rednecksith

In SOE land, server closures do indeed mean success!

Now, to those of us with intelligence who live in the real world, it means massive failure.

 

No, its still a success in the real world. They pay less for less servers, why pay more for a dwindling population?

Lol. What? This statement actually makes sense to you?

You trick yourself.

Want an analogy?

You have cancer. WHO grade IV, youre statistical rate of survival for the next 2 years is 3%. Now you can go ahead and say 'hey great, so I can spend all my retirement funding for a 1984 Ferrari Testarossa and supplies for 40000  km' and while driving somewhere between the Baikal Lake and the Mongolian border you can tell yourself "Wow, isn't this a success story, from a car-supply assistant with a 2-room appartment to a Ferrari-driving globe trotter with a trunk full of caviar (well the 1984 testarossa has no trunk but let's assume for a moment that it did)..."

The reason for your car, and your caviar, and your around-the-world-trip is still: You have cancer and you're gonna die within the next 24 months

M

actualy if you read the SWG page the "sucsess" part becomes abit clearer.

Basicly so many people transferd of the affected servers that SOE consider them dead. that is what is the sucess part. Go look for yourself in the news archive and the FAQ

This makes it a lot easier for me, i have no intention to activate my account just to move a character and both my main and my primary alt is/was in Infinity. Feels kinda refresing to not have any reason to go back to the game now. I can now firmly place SWG together with MCO and UO in the Nostalgia department.

Originally posted by liberalguy

So I just got an email from SOE:

 

---

Dear Star Wars Galaxies™ Account Holder,
Due to the overwhelming success of the recent Free Character Transfer Service, we want to inform you that on October 15, 2009, at 5:00 PM PDT, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) will close the following 12 Star Wars Galaxies servers:
Corbantis
Europe-Infinity
Intrepid
Kauri
Kettemoor
Lowca
Naritus
Scylla
Tarquinas
Tempest
Valcyn
Wanderhome

---

 
Shouldn't that say "Due to the overwhelming failure of the NGE we want to inform you that on October 15,2009, at 5:00 PM PDT, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) will close the following 12 Star Wars Galaxies servers"?

 

Too bad about Intrepid, though, my home server will be no more.
 

oooh the bitterness lol... man you're so full of rage that you can't even read properly.

"Due to the overwhelming success of the recent Free Character Transfer Service"

It means people have moved left and right, people started to gather around certain servers, leaving the rest pretty much empty and dead. It's a success in that sense of the word. Now SWG has been around since 2003, it's normal that people start leaving and that server closes. Not because of NGE... we get it, we already said that NGE sucked a few years back. There is no point in keeping servers open if there's only a population of 50.. you might as well move them.

SOE already said that NGE was a mistake back in 2006?

Originally posted by Vulnero87

Originally posted by Daffid011

I think the original poster correctly identifies the awkwardness of the email.

 

Due to the OVERWHEMLIMG SUCCESS of something, the results are server closures.   That is what they are saying.

 

The RESULT of something successful should not be something that is viewed as a sign of FAILURE. 

 

Your successful advertising campaign should not result in a decrees of sales.  Your successful new product should not result if mass layoffs.  I understand companies don't want to tell the ugly truth, but trying to act like this is some success story is just plain stupid.

 

 

They're not talking at ALL about the state of the game being a success.  They're talking about their character transfers.

That's because they called it a success. Some people look past that. What I see is.

"Thanks to the Extreme Failure of the NGE 12 servers have been deserted, we recently offered a free character transfer system which was an Overwhelming Success, we are now going to close 12 servers due to this success."

Before the NGE my home server (Scylla) was very active, even during CU it was active. Of coarse they are not talking about the state of the game, but if you can look past that, you will see this "success" wouldn't have been possible without the NGE.

Originally posted by BadgerSmaker

 

If the FCTS hadn't been used by the huge number of people that took advantage of it, the servers would not have closed.

The FCTS was a success because so many people used it.  If it had gone in and nobody had moved then it would have been deemed a failure.

Not really rocket science, and it's old news, but some people never pass up an opportunity to take a shot at SoE, even if they have to fail at reading comprehension to do so.

If you look at my recent population stats, you can see the drop off for the servers that were closed started with Chapter 6, where PvE difficulty was substantially increased over what is was after the NGE pretty much broke it. 

Players moved servers, either using the paid for CTS or rerolling, just so that they could find the groups required for the new difficulty. 

Thus started the great server population imbalance that we still see today.

Words mean things Badger. This isn't a cheap shot at SoE and it's certainly not a "failure" to comprehend - they chose their words VERY poorly (again). Honestly, SoE's PR people need to canned. They were the same people who foolishly called Death Troopers "zombies" too. It's a matter of NOT knowing your customer base and attempting to make server closings look like a good thing, when any moron with a brain knows it's a terrible thing.

There were a million other ways to spin the server closings mate, calling them an "overwhelming success" was just ignorance and stupidity. Why not try HONESTY? "Due to the vast number of players who opted to move via the FCTS, we have decided to close the 'transfer from' servers." - no lies, no spin, not negative...just truthful. Factual, not spin.

As others have pointed out, this would be like GM saying "Due to the overwhelming success of the Cash for Clunkers program, we will be closing half our plants"...that's not "spin", that's just moronic.

I understand the concept of trying to make it sound "OK" and like everything will be alright...but calling it an "overwhelming success" sounds exactly like what it is...a pathetic spin attempt to cover long term failure and fool a few people into thinking it IS a good thing when it's clearly not.

Again, words mean things. Success =/= less of a product.

You know, back when they made the NGE announcement, we told them that it wouldn't work, it wouldn't attract new players or retain existing ones. They really needed to close these servers years ago, and frankly, they don't need all of the remaining 13 servers either except for the fact that the combat engine is so flawed that it requires thin populations to semi function.

I do feel sorry for those who built communities on the now closed servers.

Originally posted by BadgerSmaker

Originally posted by TUX426

You can't take just PART of the statement. "Due to the overwhelming success of the Free Character Transfer Service..."...what? What is happening due to that success? What is the result of that success? Closing half the games servers is simply not something any reasonable company would view as a "success".

 

If the FCTS hadn't been used by the huge number of people that took advantage of it, the servers would not have closed.

The FCTS was a success because so many people used it.  If it had gone in and nobody had moved then it would have been deemed a failure.

Not really rocket science, and it's old news, but some people never pass up an opportunity to take a shot at SoE, even if they have to fail at reading comprehension to do so.

If you look at my recent population stats, you can see the drop off for the servers that were closed started with Chapter 6, where PvE difficulty was substantially increased over what is was after the NGE pretty much broke it. 

Players moved servers, either using the paid for CTS or rerolling, just so that they could find the groups required for the new difficulty. 

Thus started the great server population imbalance that we still see today.

Badger, the FCTS was created in response to certain servers having unsustainable populations.  They were already dead servers and the FCTS was only created after a long and painful process where soe dragged their feet to address the issue.  FFS smedly promised server MERGERS how many YEARS ago at fan faire?

The FCTS gave people the option to move somewhere they wanted (which was a bad choice honestly for many reasons), but if soe is closing the servers now it is because they intended to for a long time.  There is no possible way you create 1 way transfers from servers that are dead and intend to keep them live.  

My point is that the FCTS isn't some overwhelming success, because it is something that would happen regardless when soe chose to close the servers.   The FCTS didn't enable them the option to close the servers, that was going to happen regardless.

Beyond that however it is just plain stupid wording for a server closure message.  It didn't work in warhammer when mythic tried to be all happy and shiny about giving people "new homes" and it only got worse each time they cheerfully make those closure announcements.  It is just dumb.

This whole thing reminds me of the Dunkirk evacuation of WW2 when over 300K British and French troops were rescued in the "miracle of the little ships". The press presented this evacuation as such a success that Winston Churchill had to remind the people that "we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations."

Originally posted by Suvroc

This whole thing reminds me of the Dunkirk evacuation of WW2 when over 300K British and French troops were rescued in the "miracle of the little ships". The press presented this evacuation as such a success that Winston Churchill had to remind the people that "we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations."

Excellent post, and a very appropriate quote for this discussion. Kudos.

Originally posted by Daffid011

There is no possible way you create 1 way transfers from servers that are dead and intend to keep them live. 

If the uptake on the Free CTS hadn't been so overwhelming, and lets say for instance one server managed to retain a large portion of its population then it would have likely stayed up.  This didn't happen due to the "success" of the FCTS.

I spent the last six months on Infinity working with the players there in order to ensure that everything possible was being done to rebuild the server community with an aim to avoiding closure.  We managed to go out as the busiest "Transfer from" server due to those efforts, but the server population was miniscule compared to the now current lowest population of Sunrunner.

SoE gave players a choice, the majority of them took the option of moving and therefore the promotion is considered a "success", they aren't talking about the NGE or the game in general, just the fact that the uptake on the FCTS was probably more than they were originally expecting.

Originally posted by liberalguy

Originally posted by Letsinod

Dunno...looks like a success to me if they got everyone moved and getting things in line.  Sounds like your a bitter old SWG vet who can't let go.

I'm not bitter at all. I just found it amusing that SOE is saying that having to close half the servers because of lack of population is a success.

For the existing subscribers it's a success, because they get more consolidated and have so more people to play with.

Originally posted by greed0104

Originally posted by Battleskar

I find it even more amusing that your reading skills are not a success.Nowhere did they say that having to close half the servers is a success,they did say that due to the success of the transfers they would be shutting those servers down.

 

More people look at the chain of events that lead to this. If they didn't screw the game up would they have had to close 12 servers? Probably not.

Probably, as the game would hav either A still sucked, or B been full of jedi, either way you look at it it would be doing crpa today.

Hell, before the NGE came out 95% the people i saw grinding were either jedi or grinding jedi.

Originally posted by warmaster670

Originally posted by greed0104

Originally posted by Battleskar

I find it even more amusing that your reading skills are not a success.Nowhere did they say that having to close half the servers is a success,they did say that due to the success of the transfers they would be shutting those servers down.

 

More people look at the chain of events that lead to this. If they didn't screw the game up would they have had to close 12 servers? Probably not.

Probably, as the game would hav either A still sucked, or B been full of jedi, either way you look at it it would be doing crpa today.

 

Hell, before the NGE came out 95% the people i saw grinding were either jedi or grinding jedi.

That's because the jedi grind was pretty much the only endgame there was at that time.