Profile: shirlnt
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• • What are your thoughts on housing?

  • Depends on the design of the game and how housing is handled.  In a leveled game, housing does not make as much sense except to provide extra storage for a player who is willing to travel back to the area they have already outleveled in order to access storage.  Instanced housing is also not that great.  Player cities in a skill based game can be great.  They help with the feeling that you are living in that world.  I loved player housing in pre-cu SWG.  Player cities had the possibility of providing everything one needed to develop their character.  Sure, many player cities were like ghost towns except for a few vendors but there were also very active player cities with people always running in and out making purchases, getting heals and buffs, running missions, getting training, crafting items, defending bases, and roleplaying (in roleplaying I'm including all player driven activities that were not needed to advance in the game.....parties, guild meetings with avatars all in same room, weddings, etc.).

    Some people did not like player cities because they felt it spread people out to much but I always found people in the major server cities.  Others felt that it took away from PvP but I figure if people wanted to engage in PvP they would go to places where they knew PvP would occur (server cities especially those with lore faction alignment....Bestine and AH).  Plus, player cities meant players could place bases and protect those bases (want real PvP? engaging in guilds versus guilds battles over bases was a good way to do it, or is it that their definition of PvP was one shot killing a noob with TEF before the other player could even see a red dot? because that was the only "PvP" that was lost by the implementation of player cities).

  • Posted: 5/24/08 9:49 AM
    General Discussion
• • The Urban Legends of SWG

  • The thing I find funny (ironic) about #1 is that, while that was given as one of the reasons NGE was "needed," the game seems more complicated now days.  When someone post how something in the game doesn't work right, how many times has Obraik or one of the other current players responded with "if you would....that wouldn't be a problem" type posts?

    Let me see:

    -- if you would read forums....

    -- if you would use mods.....

    -- if you would change your key mapping....

    -- if you would use expertise points....

    -- if you would play until your character was higher level.... (gotta love that one....if you will pay to play a game you do not like long enough the game will eventually become enjoyable once your character is maxed out? what kind of game is that? "don't take time to enjoy the game (being as it isn't enjoyable anyway) but rush to the end of the game and then it will be fun" )

    Odd, I hopped onto SWG in 2004 after waiting to get a graphics card that the game would work with (another funny thing about SOE...it was on the list of exceptable graphic cards and about a year later it was listed as one the game was known to have bugs with) spending that time determining what species I wanted to play and where I wanted to live (noobie me, I wanted to live on Endor with the Ewoks) and I was able to play the game with little knowledge more than what the noobie droid taught me and a few abbreviations I'd learned playing TSO (such as LOL, AFK, ....basic chat talk).  Did I get the maximum experience out of it during those first few weeks or during the entire time I played it? No, but I was able to play the game and enjoy it....and I did become a little more "hardcore" as time passed.

    Now it seems that in order to enjoy the game you'd better be able to figure out how to force the game to be enjoyable in a hurry.  Don't even bother logging in for the first time until you've researched every aspect of the game and downloaded all the needed mods.

  • Posted: 5/20/08 8:57 PM
    Star Wars Galaxies
• • Why I WON'T be subscribing to SWG

  • Originally posted by Camman321
    

     

     

    Social/community: While it seems the forums are booming with activity, ingame, no so much.

     

    There is no region or general chat. The only chat you EVER see is if you're standing next to some one, guildchat, group or a tell. There's no trade chat, general chat, recruit chat, NOTHING!  This is very lame and unexceptable for MMORPG.

     

    You join a guild. But the only benefit of a guild is to talk to people. There is NO option fo a guildpage. You have no clue who's in your guild, you'd barely know your own guild name if it wasn't sitting above your head.

     

    
    Community...was once booming, "Corolag" as it was known on Bria wasn't due to crappy system, it was due to number of players hanging out in and around starport and cantina.  Imagine 2 full groups of 20 people, a third one possibly forming, smaller groups joined to master dancer/master musician for buffing purposes, plus people standing around getting mind healed.  YES, I said mind...the "M" in what use to be "HAM" which was used by certain abilities, could receive "wounds," and could result in "death" if it emptied or went black.

    Chats....others may exist and need to be set up to see but there was a time they weren't needed (probably part of reason they still aren't in use today).  Between guild, tells, and local one could hardly keep up with all the chatting anyway.  And back to community, people knew where to find groups so there was no need for a "LFG" chat server or planet wide.

    Groups....maximum of 20 people, no levels on players so noobs could be grouped with "completed template" with both benefitting from the grouping.

    Guilds....served plenty of purpose back in the day if you had a good one.  People needed other players back then even if just to get supplies (and there was decay so it wasn't "max my character, get what I need, set for life of game" but "crap, broken weapon/armor/speeder/....need to get it fixed/replaced" and hoping it didn't happen at a bad spot) or buffs/heals.

    Basically, this game was VERY different back then.  If you saw the bit with Koster and some other guy describing what the game would be like, you'd know a LOT of thought went into the game...so much that a crappy dev team can't compete with it (although a group of individuals who use to play the game....or a couple of groups...are trying...but that's something to be left out of these forums).

  • Posted: 5/19/08 7:58 PM
    Star Wars Galaxies
• • Classic-> NGE-> CU/RB

  • If SWG had started out as NGE?  At least it would be a whole lot easier to find a game that replaced it if the desire to play MMOs continued to exist after that experience.  TSO hooked me on MMOs due in part to it's social aspect.  When I started playing SWG, I thought I was playing a "traditional" style MMO.  (I knew TSO was different as it didn't have combat and was based on a single-player sim.)  I thought ALL other "traditional" MMOs would be designed like SWG.  Then the levels were added with CU along with massive grouping but for the first time I heard the words "we have enough low level people in our group."  What a change!  The second combat character I created during pre-cu, I headed straight to AH on Bria.  I had learned from my first combat toon that grouping in AH was the best way to get xp (I'd started as a noob getting xp on things outside Mos E which is the LONG way to noobie grind.)  Someone was advertising for group members but no noobs please.  Kept my mouth shut, joined the group, and was a successful member of the group with not much more than a starting profession unlocked box.  There was no big flashing "NOOB LEVEL" sign over my head that allowed people to discriminate against me.  Then came NGE and the crap that went with it (in CU people of various levels could still group, kill things of higher level as member of group, and get good xp from the group).  The NGE started out unplayable but I will admit I returned a few times....with the time I stayed getting shorter and shorter and me usually ending up dancing in the empty guild city's cantina as I chatted with the few guild members left using SWG as an expensive chat room.

    BUT, post NGE I went through several other MMOs in an attempt to find one like SWG....after all remember I thought SWG followed a "traditional" MMO model.  After all, it turned a year old around a month after I started playing it so the language was in place and used like it was a common language (player cities, server cities, mission terminals, waypoints, skill boxes ...).  How was a noob to MMO worlds with combat to know that the language was fairly unique to SWG (and perhaps a few other MMOs)?  I thought it would be rather easy to find a replacement.  How wrong I was!

    IF NGE had been my original SWG experience, IF I had not been turned off of MMOs by the bugginess and style of playing that was NGE in the beginning (assume the game was playable after a year on the market and I was not totally turned off by the way the game was designed which is a big stretch for the second so let's go with maybe I would not have assumed that all MMOs had the same system or me being so hooked on MMOs from TSO that I was willing to give others a try), and IF the lack of need for community (AKA the "social aspect") had not turned me off MMOs, at least there would have been other, even better, games to play.  BUT then we are assuming that I would have even picked up SWG to begin with since the description on the box that convinced me to buy it as I was standing in the store waivering back and forth was the ability to be a tailor or entertainer.  In a game designed from the beginning as NGE, would those professions have existed?  If looting starts out as the best way to get stuff, why have crafting professions at all? If kill, loot, repeat in a grindfest is the mode of a game, why have a profession based on actually taking time out of a grindfest to heal or buff?  I know I wouldn't have needed a second account because traders are straight traders with all the skills they need for trading so I wouldn't have bought a second account based on a need for vendors as my master crafter/master tailor/master musician template didn't have any extra points for getting more vendors.  And it was getting hooked on CH from the first CH/BE I met in game that caused me to turn that second account into a combat toon.

  • Posted: 5/13/08 8:33 PM
    Star Wars Galaxies
• • New Star Wars MMO

  • Aww, you beat me to the punch!  Saw this trailer in the movie theater tonight and was wondering what type of game would be made from it.  It has a video game look to it already.  Don't know about MMO but you know some type of game will be made to go along with it.  I doubt LucasArts would pass up the chance to make as much money from the movie as possible.  Remember the 2 major game changes to SWG were tied the new triology.  The first came around Episode 2 if I remember correctly and the second came with Episode 3.

  • Posted: 5/09/08 10:35 PM
    Star Wars Galaxies