Star Wars Galaxies

After reading the threads, I won't join.

Why didn't the game designers see this as clearly and then WHY didn't they change it back to the initial setup of a few knights and only the elite players?

It's such a shame. Is it still worth playing at all?

Is it still worth playing at all?

No.  At least not for a monthly fee.  If it were free...  MAYBE.  But games like WoW, AoC, EVE, LotRO, CoH/CoV, and a number of other games I have tried are much better than SWG as it stands today, they come with far less bugs, and they likely won't keep changing the game structure like SOE does.

Short Answer:  Don't waste your time.

Originally posted by tornsage

Why didn't the game designers see this as clearly and then WHY didn't they change it back to the initial setup of a few knights and only the elite players?

SOE's greed. Pure and simple.

Originally posted by tornsage

After reading the threads, I won't join.

Why didn't the game designers see this as clearly and then WHY didn't they change it back to the initial setup of a few knights and only the elite players?

 

It's such a shame. Is it still worth playing at all?

Tbh I think some of the lead designers did see the problems.  I think they wanted more time to fix the professions and other serious bugs and issues before the game initially went live.  I think they also wanted to have more than two weeks to implement the entire jedi system.  They didn't get that time, and the game released with a ton of serious bugs and issues.  Still, a lot of people played it, because it was a StarWars MMO, it had a lot of depth, and really created a community feeling.

Players and devs were working together on correcting the most serious bugs and issues.  They talked about approaching a testing phase for the fixes.  Then WoW released in a highly polished state and did great--not coincidentally.  SOE was operating on a release now, make it work later philosophy.  Blizzard was not.

People, including former devs for SOE, have talked about SOE management feeling some anxiety about the success of WoW and the relative lack of success of SWG.  People, including at least one former dev from SOE, have suggested that marketting types began suggesting radical changes to the game that would be sure to make the game a success.  Many of these radical changes would copy WoW outright, others seemed to copy another successful game at the time, StarWars Battlefront.

So, instead of following through on their original vision, and implementing the bug fixes that players and devs worked on together, SOE tried to tap into WoW's audience via two rushed, bug-ridden, unwanted entire game revamps.   The second revamp was arguably the worst, in that much of the players' progress up to that point was simply deleted, along with most of the game's professions.

Add to that the idea that the second revamp was a surprise, and that it invalidated much of a new expansion people just paid for two weeks earlier, and you have an MMO catastrophe.

Since all of that has happened, SOE has slowly added back some of the features that used to make the game enjoyable.  They have also addressed some bugs and issues, but many still remain, and the playerbase has been put through a meat grinder.

Now there's talk of a new StarWars MMO coming out in a couple of years, and people wonder if SWG will survive.

So, I think a lot of the devs knew what needed to be done, but they weren't sitting in the big chair.  In fact, some devs warned management that their strategy was going to cost them much of their current playerbase.  A minority of the devs present were pitching some of the whacky ideas that ended up in the second, hated revamp, but many (probably most) were not.  Some developers left SOE when they learned what was going on, and others asked for transfers to other projects.

So, what went wrong?  In summary, everything I've seen suggests that with WoW's success, management hit the panic button and decided upon a poorly thought out "copy wow" strategy, instead of sticking with their original vision and making it a success.  In so doing, they turned a game with some problems into a nightmare, alienated most of their players and damaged their reputation in the industry.

Is it worth playing?  Well, tbh I think that's a judgement call.  One that you alone can make.  I've decided not to go back, in light of the history I've just described, and unfortunately experienced first-hand.  Some people seem to think the game is wonderful (a few of them post here ocassionally).  If you want to know why they think that, well you'd have to ask them.

I think what ruined this game is laziness and tunnel vision.

Laziness on the part of gamers who dont want to work for things and when they cant have what they want they complain. When everyone in an mmo is special, no one is.

The tunnel vision is something that SOE did. They couldnt realize that shifting the target audience focus away from the diehard fans to the short-term players who have ADD would upset the very core of the customers that were paying their bills. That is just plain ignorance.

Us gamers and soe as a whole are to blame. While there were people, myself included, who did the jedi grind, there were always people who didnt want to do the work. They must have been the people SOE telemarketed to ask how to make the game better.

As far as being fun, try it. Dont listen to disgruntled people. Do the work and install the game. Decide for yourself. You may like it, who knows.

I think it was it being a Star Wars IP, I couldn't imagine SOE doing what they did if it was their own IP but in game terms then it all started with Jedi and ended with NGE.

as a huge SW fan, and SWG only being my 2nd MMO(DAoC) i was playing this game to "live in the SW universe", as it were.

I could deal with the bugs, glitches, missing or broken content and whatever because I was having a great time with what was there.

with the help of ingame GM's I set up a few ingame events and had a pretty active guild(2nd guild on server to have a pa hall, 3rd city on server)

I had also set up my own little faction war in a remote area of tattoine. 2 bases of each faction right across from each other. was great to sit back and watch the npcs engaged in a constant battle.

I guess what ruined the game for me was there being 100's of jedi per server during a time in the SW universe where there arent supposed to be more than a handfull at most.

at first I was able to deal. there were maybe 10 or so jedi on the whole server. but when that number swelled to 50+ it made the game less and less enjoyable.

then one day the members of one guild decided they didnt like my faction farm and destroyed all 4 bases. they had around 25 jedi with them and they easily dispatched the 40-50 non jedi and 5 or so jedi who came to defend it.

that was the final straw for me. i had worked hweeks top get it up and running and then a bunch of jedi, jedi who shouldnt even be in the damn game, came and destroyed it in less than 1 hour.

I tried the game about a year ago and at first I enjoyed it. I never played the game before the NGE so I didn't have any animosity per se. I am a huge Star Wars fan and obviously the IP is the main reason I checked the game out. While I enjoyed the game at first a few things started to bother me. While I actually like the combat system and the overall atmosphere of the game. The planets are huge. It's actually one of the biggest games I have come across. The game just doesn't feel right. They have gutted the game twice and there is all this old code floating around. So what you have is the new game built right on top of the old game. So a lot of things just don't quite work right. Another thing is the game is not very friendly to the new player. The tutorial station gives you a good idea about the game but you get no real help in starting a pilot career, building ships, crafting, or the beast master system. No real class or faction specific quests. You just have the stupid Legacy Quest which is fine until you start your 4th or 5th alt and have to do the same damn thing. The only other way to level up is to grind and that takes foooooreeeever.

The game is ok but i felt that I could not in good conscience pay any more for it. I play EQ2 and City of Heroes. i am not an SOE hater and i don't have a problem with EQ2. I just wish they would push and advertise it more because it is a pretty good game.

One last note. I am damn near insulted over the addition of the voice chat. Of all the damn things that could be done to improve this game they put in a damn voice chat?!? Maybe back before the servers were dead but this is just useless. I refuse to give this game any more time. It's broken and they don't want to fix it.

I could really go on with how the game was wrecked.

* Longstanding, Unresolved Bugs / Issues:  Stuff that NEVER has been fixed with the game.  I also lump in the lack of updates / fixing / revamps of some professions that really,