Why SWG will never rise again (or die completely)
Original thoughts and observations by Haleigh Comette
March 16, 2008
Why doesn't SOE listen to us?
Well, lemme tell ya Star Wars fans, your game will never be what you want. SOE can't allow it.
On the plus side, your game will never be allowed to completely die. SOE can't afford that either.
Station Pass: 9 games in one, baby.
SWG players are SOE customers shared with LucasArts, Station Pass players and Everquest/EQ2/Planetside players are not.
Sony Online Entertainment Homepage motto: "We've Got Your Game"
Take a deep breath and accept the obvious: It is not in SOE's best interest to have SWG be their most popular game.
The "worst case scenario" for SOE is if SWG becomes the most popular game in their repertoire, and their EQ, EQ2, and PS players migrate over to it. That would be a disaster for SOE, they would have donated their core playerbase to a game which they cannot claim full rights to. LucasArts would have them by the ballz, and they know this.
The "second worst case scenario" for SOE is if LucasArts ends their partnership, and a new Star Wars MMO shows up as a competitor. No longer will they be able to lure gamers in using the Star Wars name, and funnel them over to their other games using Station Pass.
Japanese corporations aren't full of dupes, they know exactly what they are doing. (No comment on bumbling American corporate "brains" like LucasArts) Sony was one of the corporations involved in "borrowing" microprocessor technology from Motorola during the 1980's, in what both sides considered a "mutually beneficial" partnership. (Is Motorola still king of electronic gadgetry? lol)
Want proof? Here's a timeline for you:
Summer 2004:
Publish 9 SWG was the dominant PvP game of its time. Ranked the eighth most popular game in August '04 by XFire tracking, behind a collection of PvE games and desktop games (including Solitaire).
I truly believe, that SOE did not plan to make SWG a PvP game, that is why the penalties for death were so steep. The game's mechanics were too buggy to support it, the problems we saw from launch are evidence of it. SOE marketers actually promoted SWG as an easy to play game, when it was anything but.
But we surprised them, we formed groups and dropped bases, we assembled huge raiding parties, and defenders fought heroically, the penalties merely introduced an intensity in SWG PvP that could not be found anywhere else. To other games that came afterwards, this was like the accidental discovery of penicillin, other games have used decay to try and mimic the nuclear PvP atmosphere that happened in SWG by accident.
We bonded, we experienced both honor and betrayal, and discovered things about ourselves that rarely come to the surface IRL. The steep penalties for dying and expense of losing bases actually fueled the intensity of the PvP, rather than quench it.
You who were a part of it, felt your heart skip a beat as you read this. You remember the forum lockdowns and mass bannage to make them useable at all. That was some intense conflict, lol.
To quote Auraboron, the former GCW correspondent "of doom":
There has never been a more exciting time in all my years of electronic gaming (we're talking since Pong here) and nothing since has come close.
November 2004: EQ2 launch
January 2005: Combatant base overhaul, Factional TEF's, Militia TEF's, BH TEF's, cool water poured over the GCW on all fronts. Combatant (PVE) bases are given out for free along with the purchase of every "Special Forces" PvP base. SOE did not make any pretense about it, they changed the way player bases were used to "stop griefing" and cool the flames.
Mind you, this was not in response to any drop in subscriptions. This was because the GCW was too hawt to handle, and it put too much pressure on the CSR's to manage the flood of reports.
May 2005: SWG has a larger playerbase than EQ2 again for the third month straight. The "Combat Upgrade", or the "CU", is pushed in, nerfing about half of the existing in game items and overhauling most every skill. EQ players were actually given an ingame poll about whether the CU should proceed or not: SWG players were not even given such a poll! SOE didn't even bother to take the poll in SWG to cover their real target playerbase, the SOE players in SOE "original" games.
November 2005: Planetside overhaul, and the "New Game Enhancements" for SWG, which oddly enough, made SWG into an FPS much like Planetside, only much buggier and at the expense of most everyone's accomplishments in game to date. (I'm not even going to touch on the jedi issue here)
February 17, 2006: The all-time rock bottom of SWG, and the most telling SOE move about their intentions. Literally, noone had any hope for the game, right down to the most loyal fanboys (and fangirls like myself). Three days earlier, the "annual" producer letter showing a rosy outlook (that reminded us all of a Cold War Communist press release) had produced a universal backlash. Odd, that three days later the producer's letter turned out to not be "annual" after all.
With SOE's back against the wall, they released a "publish plan" for the year that turned around SWG, that very day. The game was dead and buried that morning, and by that night excited players and astonished vets streamed into the forums and the game, wide-eyed that SOE actually understood what could make the game great again. We already knew, but we thought SOE was too stupid to figure it out.
We were wrong: SOE knew exactly what they were doing, even as they would send clowns like Julio Torres into an interview to make idiotic claims (like "Jedi is not a starter profession") to make us think otherwise. While posting repeatedly that he doesn't play SWG, but he plays WoW, and 5 or 6 other games he mentions by name lol.
That dev letter has since been erased from all of SOE's records as if it never existed, it has even been eliminated from the dev archive that includes every other letter.
Here are some links to some other sites that archived it, while they remain:
Here were the parts of that announcement that brought back the vets (I should know, they were my friends, whenever I talked to one I'd cite that letter and they would be ingame and resubbed inside of a week):
New and Improved GCW BasesPvP Decay (NOTE: Under investigation. Please give us some feedback.)
- All new player-placed PvP Galactic Civil War bases
- Brand new heavy weapon emplacements that all players can use to defend the bases
- E-Web Heavy Repeating Blaster
- Mortar Emplacements
- Various manned turrets
- And more!
- Exciting new interior puzzles and obstacles to overcome
- All new base destruction dynamic with Officer-specific activity sets
PvP Enhancements
- Some items will decay on death in PvP. Eventually this decay will cause the item to be non-functional.
- Traders will be able to make repair kits. They will also be able to offer replacements for sale.
- Certain hard to get or unique items will be exempted from this system.
- A command will be added that can be used from the tool bar that will allow players to declare from “Combatant” to “Special Forces” in the field. This will take 30 seconds to execute.
- If you are killed in PvP combat by another player, they will be rewarded one of your items chosen at random. This could be either an equipped item or an item in your inventory. No-drop, bio linked, and no-trade items will be exempt from this. (NOTE: We want to hear your feedback on this. Please take a minute to vote on our PvP Death Penalty poll.)
- After you are killed you will have the option of placing a bounty on your attacker. This will deduct the specified amount from your bank account or from your cash on-hand and add the bounty to your killer. Bounties placed on a player will be cumulative, so if multiple bounties are placed on a player, their overall bounty will increase. The bounty can then be claimed by a Bounty Hunter as described below.
Player bases, BH missions [with real consequences], and Decay, only one of the three was ever implemented, and weaker than originally promised. Player bases were returned, and for a time, on some servers experienced a resurgence, most notably in my home server of Sunrunner. Plenty of video links on my Video page if anyone has any doubt the potential of player bases, that SOE will never unleash.
So what happened in Round 2?
Base Clubbing (exploitation of bases) tolerated by SOE, even openly, despite promise after promise to fix it.
PvP zones, with rewards of:
Players who participated in any PvP outside the zones got nothing to show for it, while players inside the zones got the collection of rewards, even for not PvPing.
To make things worse, server resources were more heavily allocated to the PvP zones, the lag in other areas was so intense, 30 second server-side lag was routine, and 10-minute chat lag not uncommon. When someone's base asploded, it was common to have players transported randomly to other planets.
Don't worry SWG players, your game is no longer fixable. By the direction they pushed the game over time, the remaining playerbase, small though it may be, is the lootwhoring/Star Wars crowd, who love the Star Wars genre and will play it as long as they are given something to do at all. They won't support a return to the explosive game SWG once was, and could have been as recently as last year. They want to casually PvP in no-stakes PvP zones and leave when they feel like it.
SOE has finally made SWG what they wanted it to be all along: A lootwhoring game with casual PvP that is far inferior to most others of its kind, but has the Star Wars name to keep it afloat. SWG will not threaten the other SOE games with supreme domination, and players who want to play better-built games will eventually migrate over to the ones SOE wants them to play.
Truthfully, if SWG is ever allowed to become what SOE knows full well it can be, one of the other SOE games will have to be successful enough to hold players first. I'm not holding my breath either.
Note to Strel: Don't even think about having this published ... I wrote it first