Star Wars Galaxies

Is that now, in SWG, is an entire new generation of players that has no idea how good we had it back then.

And when you tell them how the game used to be (I only tell them if they ask), they're like "No...really?  Damn, I wanna be able to do that!"

*sigh* 

I think I am going to write a disjointed timeline of what I remember of SOE/community relations, starting with my joining the game in October, 2003.  A lot of people have forgotten that they were never good at listening to us, going way back to long before the NGE.

I remember the big CH nerf of late 2003.   CH became a FOTM profession, and in an effort to appease those who whined about it, SOE borked it, and reduced it to less than it should have been.  I was all for balancing it, but not making it completely unviable in PVP.

Call it catharsis, but I have a theory of where all the trouble started.

The holocron giveaway of December 24, 2003.  Yes, I think that started everything going forward and leading up to the NGE.  Veteran players know exactly what I'm talking about, and have probably pondered the same things.

This giveaway made the playerbase go nuts.  Even I was swept up in it.  Suddenly everything became about grinding to Jedi.  Everything became about what the Jedi wanted, then eventually, what the non-Jedi felt was unfair treatment.  This leads to the CU, which broke a lot of things.  I shall forever miss strafeshot2. 

Meanwhile, all the other professions fell by the wayside.  Oh sure, little tweaks here and there.  I remember the combat droids that came out just before patch 12.  Those were a riot. 

I seem to remember a letter I wrote just before the CU came out that I never posted.  I'm trying to find it now.  Ah yes, here it is, in its entirety.  I almost left the game over the fact that problems with CH were being ignored, to which I discovered later a lot of professions were being ignored.  I obviously know more now than I knew then.  I think we all do.  But, for your viewing pleasure...

March 20, 2005 -- PRE-CU FORUM POST TO SOE THAT WAS NEVER PUBLISHED

Give me a reason, SOE.  Why should I stay in this game?

Your marketing strategies for people that love this game have been one blunder after another.  Even those who cling blindly to the game in the hope that it will get better will keep losing faith, one by one.

The only professions you fixed were droid engineer and chef.  That is all.  In the 2 years I have been in this game, that is the only real progress I have seen. 

Your nerfing of CH was a huge mistake.  Couple that with mismatched and unbalanced professions, template stackers, banning people from speaking their minds about this game.

Your handing out holocrons in December of 2003 was the opening of the Pandora’s Box that would ultimately destroy this game’s community.  I haven’t seen a decent sense of community on my server like I did since before the day those were handed out.  Big, big mistake.

Your next blunder was ignoring other professions, giving no timetable on anything, then suddenly fixing DE and Chef.  After that, you gave people a sense of false hope. 

Then your marketing team decides Jedi need to be next.  Jedi were never supposed to be an integral part of this game.  Unless you had planned to advance the Star Wars timeline forward to the Expanded Universe Post-Return of the Jedi days when Luke Skywalker had a Jedi Academy, having Jedi walking around the streets of Theed, Coronet and Mos Eisley was the biggest mistake you could have ever made.

There were plenty of other things you could have done in this game to make it viable, aside from hand everyone the keys to the Jedi closet.

But let’s move on here, shall we?  You revamp Jedi, still ignoring the other professions you nerfed or were already broken to begin with.  Then you proceed to simultaneously announce to us that we shouldn’t expect to see the combat rebalance for at least another year.  Great.  That means a bunch of people grinding to Jedi, while others PvP with their ridiculous stacked uber templates. 

Then the final mistake that sealed the game’s fate…you devote the rest of your time to developing Jump to Lightspeed, an ignoble joke which power gamers conquered in mere weeks and are now already bored with.  For 29.99, you didn’t add much content to the game, even if you added more bells and whistles.  Your changes came far too little, and far too late. 

By the way, this past December of 2004, 75,000 credits as a Holiday gift was a big slap in the face to a veteran player.  I can make that much money on the terminals in less than 30 minutes with no buffs.

So at last we come to the fundamental flaw in the game at the present time.  Kashyyyk and the combat upgrade.  Seems that people should be excited about this, doesn’t it?  I don’t see many people in the game very excited about it.  The truth is, they ARENT.  The people speaking on these forums about being excited about it are either truly blind to what is happening before them, or they are simply afraid to speak out.  And they probably won’t speak out now.

You know, 6 months ago when you were messing with this Jedi revamp, Kashyyyk might have been a nice idea.  The combat upgrade might have sated people had you stuck with it the day you over-nerfed Creature Handlers, and rebalanced ALL the professions.

But as I said, people I poll in private within the game are NOT excited at all, about anything.  Why?  Maybe because all of this is too little, too late? 

The saddest part of all of this—that for some reason, NO one, not even Zina will acknowledge—is that people have left my server en masse.  My once loyal and valued and trusted friends in this game are long gone, ALL of them gone for the likes of CoH, WoW or EQ2.  You are losing people, SOE.  And I mean that in the most pleading tone, NOT a belligerent tone.  What is your response to this?  Naritus is a ghost town now!  I would pay the 30 bucks to move to another server, but I have no intention of losing a pet collection I worked so hard to build (and frankly, it amazes me that you can’t let someone keep their datapad and inventory when you move them).

Give me a reason, SOE.

Every single time I log in, I see very depressing things.  I see buffbots, I see no real community activities, I see nothing with a remotely ‘star warsy’ feel to it.  I see Coronet deserted on Friday nights.  I see everyone still left grinding to Jedi.  I see no one helping the few newbies that rarely show up on this server.

Now you announce the combat upgrade is coming, you dress it up with the addition of a planet and a few quests (that in my experience in this game, will likely be broken), and then you tell me I have to pay for this combat upgrade.  What IS this?  

EQ2, which I have played, does not treat its customers this way, and yet you people work for the SAME company.  Maybe you should adopt some marketing strategies from the EQ2 team, not to mention customer service skills. 

Expansions for Everquest II are less than 5 bucks, and downloadable.   When servers went down in the early days of the game, the developers apologized for the inconvenience and let everyone have a ‘freebie’ day where everyone earned double xp for 24 hours as a make up for the missed downtime.  The entire community within the game is full of very nice people.

Do not mistake what I am trying to make clear here.  You may think me someone who simply cannot be made happy no matter what SOE does and that I should just leave the game, but that’s far from true. 

To the SOE/SWG team, your efforts have been noticed, but how many mistakes are you going to have to make before you don’t have a customer base left to speak of?  How much are you going to continue to ignore your customers?  I have blindly plodded along like many, but now that I have seen and played games like WoW and EQ2, I have to honestly say that maybe SWG is too big a game for you to handle.  And now that I have played these other games, I keep saying to myself “what a damn shame”, because I look at these non-Star Wars games and I think to myself how GREAT SWG could be, but isn’t. 

 How much longer is this going to go on, SOE?  Give me a sign, an answer that you care about me and other customers like me, and give me a reason.

 Give me a reason to stay. 

Funny how everything changed after that, isn't it?  But I also find it interesting that some things didn't change.  Our problems with SOE ignoring its community were always there, and looking back, I think it's because they couldn't hire a development team that could properly support Verant's original game code.

But then as I said, the CU came out, which in my opinion was a flashy joke.  I still hated those colored icons over our previous ones.  Things like poison and disease stims were rendered useless.  But we still had the mind bar, at least. 

This letter just made me remember that we always had problems, that's the bottom line.  Rather than focus on the core game, they uplifted Jedi and ignored everyone and everything else.   The letter makes me think back on all the professions that were broken...that in my opinion, still could have been fixed.  Smuggler...Squad Leader... Scout... Ranger... Commando... the list goes on and on.  Professions that were beyond broken and not even popular, like Pistoleer.  They could have all been fixed and balanced.

I really think it all started with the holocron giveaway.  Or maybe it started by making Jedi a too easily unlocked profession to begin with.  If anything, they should have made it harder.  People would have complained, yes.  But people would also have STILL tried to do it.

In spite of everything I said in that unpublished letter, I'd still rather have pre-CU SWG with Jedi and Jedi wannabes running around than what we have now.

The original pre-CU game was so different.  And so ahead of its time.  How I long to have it back.

for epic effect: of lies,treachery, and red bull

1. SWG wont launch until its ready - SOE repeatedly told us this game wont launch until its ready to go. This early on was to include space, JTL wasnt ever supposed to be an expansion. Lets also not forget key components not included at launch like player cities, vehicles, and jedi. As a beta player, I still remember the notice in beta forum that the game was going gold in 2 weeks. Everyone agreed it was a huge mistake but SOE ignored us.

2. Jedi - We all know that jedi was NEVER possible at launch. Yet SOE made post after post dangling that carrot and offering encouragement. They told us to get married, explore every world, build a home, etc. It made some think that jedi was some random amazing quest to be discovered. Soon though we learned the truth when SOE patched in several .tre files with obvious jedi implications 5 months after launch. Then the day after a patch several unlocked all at once.

3. Rebel Theme Park - Sorta ties into # 1 as it wasnt ready either. However SOE repeatedly lied about the theme park. If you recall, it was broken after Han's quests. Han tells us to seek out Lt. Lance on Dantooine, but there isnt any Lt. Lance anywhere. SOE tells us its working as intended despite nobody having found Lt. Lance after months and month of looking (my guild personally had several major expedition searches done over many weekends looking for him). Suddenly we learn the truth after a patch...Han now tells us to seek out Ackbar on Dantooine and the once empty abandoned rebel base now has several rebel nps in there. My guild who had followed the game for years in development was soooo pissed off they immediately disbanded and quit.

4. two part lie -

A. The Combat upgrade (curb) was top priority - Remember how SOE told us over and over again that the CURB was its number 1 focus. It would be first to get completed over the JTL expansion.

B. There were two separate teams working on JTL and the CURB.

We later learn both are lies. JTL gets pushed over the combat fixes AND we find out the CURB team has been merged with the JTL team. Whats really insulting is SOE goes on a PR campaign and tells the public that we players demanded JTL first. Another fat lie as every poll posted strongly stated we wanted the CURB first.

5. Combat Revamp - whatever you want to call it, this was meant as a reward for the vets who stayed around and played a broken game. Talk about a slap in the face when SOE announces the CU...a system as the devs told me at Celebration 3 was meant to "have a more broad appeal". This was SOE's 1st attempt at screwing over its current community for the wow crowd. All the promised fixes never happened. The armorsmith rep quit and was banned after he started a massive protest over changes they never asked for. In fact the CU brings in many more bugs than it fixes and never balanced anything.

6. The CU is here to stay - Smedley comes and makes his first post on swg forums asking for calm and patience. He states that in 6 months the cu will be working as intended so give them time to make things right. FAT LIE...during that time the NGE is either in design stages or already being worked on.

7. FRS - CU disables the end-game for jedi, our force ranking system. SOE tells us its being worked on. Later they state its al most done and just awaits final approval from LA. Of course we learn there wont ever be a FRS system and the nerfs we've been getting oover the past 6 months were done on purpose to weaken jedi into a regular class. For me personally, this is one of the more disgusting lies as it was obviously done to keep us jedi players paying.

8. Jabba Palace disappears - The last patch before the NGE garbage makes Jabba's palace completely disappear. SOE acts surprised and promises a fix is coming..another fat lie as we learn why after the nge hits. Jabba's palace was taken out to implement th new nge quests.

9. village breaks - Same patch breaks the village and the old man stops visiting people. SOE again lies to cover its tracks and tells us its being looked at. Of course it was just a cover for the nge.

10. Expansion - SOE presells an expansion with several promised features. One desired item is a creature handler necklace that will allow for the taming of higher lvl pets. Im not sure if that necklace was ever found but it didnt matter because 1 stinkin day after the nge launched Torres of LA announces the revamp of the game and removal of over 24 professions.

11. starter kit - SOE tells us the starter kit is an eroneous listing and will be removed. They deny the rumors of impending changes.

12. SOE tells us fixes will be faster. SOE says the whole reason behind the nge was to make balancing the game easier and would allow for faster publish fixes. In fact, it has slowed the game down to a crawl as publishes now seem to come every 4 months as opposed to almost monthly before the nge.

13. smuggler revamp - this one could have its own page on broken promises and lies.

14. Capitol ships - a dev at a fanfest shows the players capitol ships he has been working on. Later on SOE tells (months and months later) that it was just a dev fooling around with his laptop and this was never being considered. Of course SOE could have tol the players this months earlier rather than ignore the posts asking for more information. To flyboys, the capitol ship dream was their FRS system...ie end-game content they so very much wanted. It didnt hurt SOE to once again lie a little and let people keep paying while they waited for features that would never ever happen.

15. profession revamps - ranger comes to my mind foremost because my alt was a master ranger for years. It was painful to see rangers slowly dwindling in numbers as the profession remained broken forever. I still recall one of the camo kits (i think it was for Lok) required a type of meat to contruct, only problem was that meat didnt even exist ! And the final tease, SOE says ranger is the next revamp coming in the next publish...oops the next publish turned out to be the NGE.

Then there were the professions that got sorely needed revamps weeks before the nge hit. Why did SOE even bother to revamp squad leader if they were going to turn around and remove the profession entirely a few weeks later ? Maybe it was a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing.

16. Broken quests - How many times did SOE tell us a fix was in the works and it either never came or it took a year to do. And even when they finally did fix something like the Hermit quests, they turn right around and re-break them weeks later. My personal pet peeve for broken quests was the ones at the gungan sacred place. It pissed me off that not only were the quests incomplete, one of the npc's chat bubble was blank ! How tough would it have been to code in some simple words ? These quests were broken in beta, remained busted through launch right up to the nge.

The NGE broke several old quests as well. When I tried the 21 day free trial I started the krayt skull quests, some of my favorites with a great storyline. I got to the last part where I needed to talk to Darklighter only to my surprise he has no chat option. The NGE is 1 year old and Im assuming this quest remains broken, pathetic.

17. 6 month promises - Smedley has repeatedly made the 6 month promise for fixes. His very 1st post following the CU debacle asked the players to give SOE 6 months to get things fully working. He then makes the same promise after the NGE launches, needing 6 more months. Ironically, the post after nge is almost identical to the cu one (asking for time to fix things) and yet somehow the gullible desperate players buy into it AGAIN. Later SOE promises major revamps to each profession each coming within a month or two o each other. Later after MONTHS of no publishes and silence (the swg forums were literally rioting), SOE announces yet ANOTHER series of profession revamps. Typically, the pathetic player base thanks SOE devs in posts for answering their concerns. A year into the NGE, it remains broken, unfinished, with no end in site.

18. Item Conversion - Recall that the players were very concerned over losing their gear with the coming CU. We were repeatedly told that everything would convert properly. If you had an exceptional weapon with amazing stats, it would convert to an equal type of weapon for the CU. They were full of crap though and not only did our exceptional weapons and armor NOT convert properly, in many cases we now couldnt even equip them anymore !!!

CA's and AA's didnt convert because SOE took out several stats like dizzy, knockdown, the poison and disease resists, etc. Players that spent years and millions of credits to collect were overnight ruined. The final insult in classic SOE fashion, SOE adds in melee def and ranged def clothing that tailors can craft. They didnt even bother to take into account the thousands of players who spent their credits by the millions to get these things as ca/aa drops. A +12 melee def tape would possibly sell for 15-20 million, 1 day after the cu and a player now can buy a shirt with +17 melee AND ranged defense !!! So much for really being concerned with ca/aa conversions.

RIS Armor - Not only did the conversion for this armor become crap, it also got very common. I and some friends of mine were the few around who had even had any ris armor. Before the revamps, RIS armor was something one could try and get as a trophy to their hard work and dedication. Plus it took real skill to get. You had to know where the components dropped. You had to know spawn rates. You had to know where to find the giant dune kimos. You had to find addon components like shards to boost the completed armor's stats. In essence, it was a lot of hard work for players that yet again was totally tossed out the door. My ris helmet once had offers of 15 million credits, suddenly its for sale on vendors for 15k bleh.

BE Tissues - nge takes out bio-engineers and their tissues that make chef foods better. Now something that was once extremely common is the rarest most sought after item by crafters. And since food is a consumable, eventually there will be no more bio tissues around.

The theme here of course is SOE didnt give a damn about how their revamps would hurt or help their CURRENT community. I seriously doubt based on the evidence that they even looked at the changes, much less tried to ensure the conversion wouldnt screw us.

19. pearl drops - sometime into the cu pearl drops got really messed up. At first, over a weekend flawless and premium pearls are dropping like crazy and not just off krayts. Soon SOE hotpatches a "fix" in to correct whatever they were trying to fix before and the pearls stop dropping. Now premiums and flawless dont drop anymore. SOE responds to player concerns by telling them its working as intended. Later they admit there "might" be a problem but there were other things more important to fix. SOE lies and promises its being looked into.

According to my source, the pearl drops were broken or gated on purpose. This was done to remove the elite power items so jedi could be better balanced for the nge. I hear sometime after the nge the premium pearls were added back in but flawless never came back.

20. Gating content - According to a source who wrote a letter to CBS newsbag, SOE purposely gates its content to finish it. In other words, SOE breaks something to hide the fact that it remains unfinished. Why would SOE do this ? Well according to this person, it was done to basically use player subscription fees to pay for the finished development of that content. This source reported that this was done repeatedly for EQ1 expansions. Devs would then lie on the forums claiming that a fix was being worked on when in fact it was busted on purpose.

This of course is outrageous but not unexpected by SOE. To take subscriber money and finish something that the money from the expansion was already supposed to have paid for is unforgivable. Smedley responded on some other site he posts on that this was a fabrication and SOE had (allow me to quote) never once released an unfinished product to the public LOL. This same person later admits the nge is unfinished...oh and the CU is unfinished...my oh my how the lies grow.

You guys pretty much summed up my experience with SWG.  In the beginning I tolorated lack of content, eploits, heavy nerfs because I knew that SWG was way ahead of it's time. 

I just logged in a few days ago to see how things were going and it's pretty much the same.  There is a bunch of content now but alot of it is broken.

Tooo long.

Originally posted by Explodingme

Tooo long.

lol too much reading?