SOE CEO Responds To CBS Critiques 55
CBS's GameCore page continues to follow up with Star Wars Galaxies players on the aftermath of the NGE. Sony Online Entertainment John Smedley has gotten into the act, responding to criticisms leveled at the company in previous GameCore pieces. From the article: ""I'm bent about that one ... As a person, I have zero problem with criticism. I don't have any problem whatsoever with our customers complaining. I think it's perfectly legitimate, and I think it's perfectly legitimate for you guys to have a mailbag with hate mail from Star Wars Galaxies. But of all the mail, that's the one that bothered me because it's filled with a bunch of BS ... There has never been a release by Sony Online Entertainment that has been incomplete.
Define: Incomplete (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Define: Incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
You know... Like it would be incomplete if say... A company came along and made a MMOG about Star Wars without including that space battles part... And maybe say patched it in maybe years as an expansion pack... Oh wait...
Re:Define: Incomplete (Score:2)
Re:Define: Incomplete (Score:1)
Re:Define: Incomplete (Score:1, Interesting)
--
Smed
Registered User
Join Date: Apr 2005
Posts: 50
The new CBS story including the interview I did is now up here:
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/tech...in500397.sh tml [cbsnews.com]
For the record, it was done prior to my getting involved in this thread. One quote I gave the CBS interviewer had to do with us never releasing anything that wasn't done . Throughout this particular thread I've had you all (and here I will give Utnayan the credit)
Re:Define: Incomplete (Score:2)
Horseshit (Score:4, Insightful)
You chumps didn't even bill for EQ for the first month after "release", it was so fucked up.
Re:Horseshit (Score:2)
Re:Horseshit (Score:1)
Re:Horseshit (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Horseshit (Score:3, Informative)
So yeah... He was kind of responsible for that game too.
Re:Horseshit (Score:2)
Re:Horseshit (Score:3, Funny)
- John Smedley, Information Minister, Sony Online Entertainment [welovethei...nister.com].
Hey, if counterfactual computing works in the quantum world, why not use it in SWG?
Re:Horseshit (Score:4, Informative)
That's only the tip of the iceberg.
The first loot out of Sleeper's Tomb was
Smedley lies. Period. He often lied about many things ingame being fine and working yet they were not. Nothing new for EQ/SWG veterans. He is only on the defensive now because it's not some guild website telling people SOE games suck, but instead a CBS, a reputable news source.
Re:Horseshit (Score:1)
Re:Horseshit (Score:2)
Perhaps, but putting something in a game and says its supposed to be 'undefeatable' in a game is like leaving the keys to a hotrod on the kitchen table and then expecting a house with 10000+ kids not to take the car out on a 'test drive'.
People were killing/trying to kill Lord British the first day Ultima 1 came out. When UO came out, people STILL tried to kill Lord British (and in one case actually succeeded). And if that isn't recent
Re:Horseshit (Score:2)
I wasn't reffering at all at Kerafyrm, when Fires of Heaven first entered Sleeper's Tomb and killed the first few bosses, all loot they got was cloth caps.
Re:Horseshit (Score:2)
I'm not sure why, but that made me laugh. It is better than a lot of them, but Dan Rather's career ending clusterfuck wasn't really -that- long ago.
Smed is right... (Score:2)
Stick a fork in it already sony, it's done.
SOE is the worst (Score:2)
They have negative creativity.
Re:SOE is the worst (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:SOE is the worst (Score:2)
SOE, Bugs and Subscribers (Score:4, Interesting)
PlanetSide is perhaps the ultimate example of this. When the game first came out it was very buggy. I signed on in the first week that it was out but couldn't be compelled to recommend the game to any friends for a good 2-3 months after release because it was so flaky. Even then the person who joined up on my recommendation ended up leaving within a couple weeks because he couldn't get it to run stably on his system.
The next big screw up was the release of an expansion pack, Core Combat. This expansion pack brought minimal content and was fairly expensive. Most of the people I know who bought it when it was first released regretted it. It wasn't until the price dropped to like $10 that I could recommend it to people. $30 for a few new maps (which also has the effect of diluting the player concentrations), 3 new vehicles and 3 new weapons is rather overpriced.
Since that time, there's been a pretty steady decline in the population in the game. The final nail in the coffin was the release of BFR's, these big robots that are similar to what you'd see in Mechwarrior. It wasn't a terrible concept but they so radically altered the balance of the game that a lot of people abandoned ship.
Currently the game is decent. The pop levels are rather low, so while you'll find a battle anytime you log on, the quality of the battles has suffered a lot. Lots of 3-way stalemates happen now because there's no fun in the strategic approach of attacking empty continents. They are trying to get moe people by offering a try before you buy option where you can play as a lower level player for free. That might bring more people, or it might get exploited as people create temporary accounts to log on and grief people and cause disruptions.
It's a shame too, because the overal concept and play of the game is good. It's a really nice blend of strategy and action, but it's just been poorly managed by SOE.
Re:SOE, Bugs and Subscribers (Score:2)
This guy is way too sensitive. (Score:2, Interesting)
Now we've got for the first time I'm aware of an SOE rep publicly commenting on something that almost everyone I
Not much of an article (Score:3, Insightful)
But, Smedley's contention that SOE didn't release an "incomplete" product is based on your definition of incomplete. I am sure SOE thinks that if they finished the code and got it out the door, it's complete. We players like to see the code go through a beta process, or a test server.
The inherent problem is that many in the player base of any game think they know what would be better than the developers and designers. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes they are just plain insane. More than 90% of the ideas suggested in various forums to the WoW developers were just plain horrible. 9% had a little merit, but wouldn't work for various reasons. Maybe 1% of them made good sense. But of that 1%, 5% of that small number fit in with what the designers/developers had in mind for the class/quest/feature. The rest was discarded.
SOE made changes to try and attract more players, without getting real feedback from its existing player base. The burnt both ends of the bridge, and are now on an island by themselves, throwing ropes to the sides trying to pull players back. This has been a fine example of a game company not knowing its existing playerbase's desires for the future of the game.
SW:G probably won't be consider a MMO in a year's time. There won't be massive numbers of players online.
Then again, it wasn't that great to begin with.
Re:Not much of an article (Score:1)
'It compiled without errors? Ship it!'
Part of the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Sony/Lucas Arts/Whoever did not communicate with the existing subscriber base to explain WTF was going to happen. And after they had done it, they still didn't communicate worth a shit.
People will stick around if you tell them "it will get better" or "we're taking your complaints into consideration". Sony didn't do that and got burned for it.
Absurd article (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, more often then not, when someone releases a defective product (car, etc.), they issue a recall. Yes, this is so common, that there's a word for it. How many automotive recalls have there been? Many, to say the least. Frequently, a recall just means you bring your car back, and get whatever's broken in it fixed, and you go on with your life.
Software's even easier to fix. You don't even have to bring it back to the shop! Frequently, you can get it fixed for free, in under 5 minutes, without even getting out of your chair!
Concievably, software companys could increase their QA and/or development budgets by several orders of magnitude and iron out a few more bugs before release (or adopt a development method that avoids these sort of issues in the first place), but that cost would have to be passed on to the customer, and it wouldn't be cheap.
Yes, if a group becomes notorious for releasing unusable software, people will stop patronizing them. But a non-fatal bug here or there... who cares?
Back to the topic of writing bugless code, according to this article [cbsnews.com]:
"When Neumann's group worked with NASA on software for the space shuttle, developers were so careful about bugs that they produced just three lines of code per day..."
Bugless code is very expensive. Anyone who claims all software should be flawless clearly has no idea what they're talking about.
Re:Absurd article (Score:2)
My point was simply that the article (and many gamers) seems to assert that games should be error free, comparing the number of bugs in software to major defects in automobiles. It's an unfair, invalid, and absurd analogy.
Re:Absurd article (Score:2)
Now let's say you, like me, bought Star Wars Galaxies when it first came out, and as soon as you logged on to a server you learned that so
Bugless vs Low Bugs (Score:1)
After 340+ days played as a shaman in EQ (Score:2, Informative)
LOL - I was there (Score:3, Informative)
What a crock! I was in the beta, and nobody I knew there thought they were within weeks of ready. It literally didn't come up at all the first day, and none of the advanced professions were playable.
There was a serious disconnect somewhere in that organization that continues in Smedley's statement.
Re:LOL - I was there (Score:2)
Also a fellow beta player here, just one note... the shuttle bug. Remember that bug? How the hell did the game make it to beta with that issue?
Child's Play (Score:3, Informative)
Looks like Gabe took it down, but you can see how it started. [penny-arcade.com]
Re:Child's Play (Score:2)
Everquest 2 [igrozone.com]
World of Warcraft [gamerevolution.com]
Everquest 2 [sony.com]
Lineage 2 [gameamp.com]
Everquest 2 [ign.com]
A Tale in the Desert [apple.com]
Another Lineage 2 [vbios.com], just because I like the art style.
Everquest 2 [ign.com]
Asheron's Call 2 [turbine.com]
Everquest 2 [moneyparadise.biz]
Everquest 2 [npuguild.com]
Final Fantasy XI Online [ownage.nl]
Everquest 2 [frictionlessinsight.com]
Ragnarok Online [photobucket.com]
These are hand-picked images from a quick google images search. Hopefully that balances both ways. I'll let you all be the judge of the aesthetic quality of EQ2.
You'll also note that the imagery has gotten much more stylized as the series has progressed into t
Smedley unhinged (Score:4, Insightful)
They ignore the player in any SUBSTANTIVE way and wonder why they now have a game that should have at least a million subs and have 50,000
Arrogance.
Surely he's joking (Score:5, Insightful)
I had active accounts on both EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies up until last month (when I finally got around to cancelling them). In virtually no way was SOE actually doing what they were supposed to be doing from a gamer's point of view. They were interested in selling a product and getting people's money--which is an entirely different goal from making a game (good or not). It's possible for a company to do both, as both Blizzard and Cryptic Studios have proven. I was also a long-time subscriber to the original EverQuest. Even by the low standards EQI set, SOE was practically just marking time and cashing checks while running EQII.
The entire time I played EQII, it seemed like maybe one or two bugs got fixed a month. For a game which was supposed to have lots of developers and coders working for it, their output was approximately what I would expect from having maybe three or four people working for them. They were very good at regularly releasing "expansions" for people to buy, tho'. The problem with this is that from a traditional gamer's standpoint, these were just regularly scheduled times when the GM could be bribed to give you more loot. Every single expansion SOE releases seems to increase the amount of loot per hour players get, so you either buy the expansion, or your character suffers a serious disadvantage to the people who did.
The expansions themselves were also full of serious bugs which never seemed to get fixed. The combat system in EQII was annoying at best, since it again boiled down to the most trivial form of tank in front, healers in the back, and everyone else gets to buff and cheer them on. The "upgrade" it recieved made it even more simplistic (and intolerable).
To Penny Arcade's credit, what they said about the EQII artwork is entirely correct. I'm sure they thought they were trying to create a photorealistic environment, but that's not quite reasonable to expect out of the engine, and the end result is that the world does look like a hackup of Bryce and Poser images.
Much the same thing went on with SWG. The released without actually having finished the game, and then had to turn around and do a major 'upgrade' to it. Their space combat expansion was basically just another bribery session. You could struggle to make money as a newbie in the desert, or spend half an hour flying around space and collect literally a week's worth of money all at once. The "combat upgrade" fixed one thing at the expense of losing nearly all of it's complexity. I suppose if the goal was to make existance on the planets of SWG as simplistic as their space combat, they did the right thing. However, neither I nor apparently many other people are willing to pay a monthly fee to pay something less challenging or complex than a shareware single-player shooter.
Basically, I think SOE got spoiled by having no real competition--then continued on that same path of being able to ignore the entire player base (95% of them are morons, but there's about 5% that must be listened to because they're right. SOE regularly ign
Sony's new tagline: (Score:1)
H.
Fixed! (Score:1)
SWG - may they pull your plug soon (Score:1)
Everytime I read about SWG I get sad inside. I was in the last beta and played from retail until arount Jump to Lightspeed when it was clear that they had no idea of balance and weren't going to fix certain things.
At the start the game was really quite amazing and wonderful and promising. It started out at about 75% complete (it was definately incomplete). Most professions I chose were broken: chef, squadleader. We all thought that after
Changing directions (Score:1)
The initial direction could have been better but still, one can only tell that they would have been better to stick with it and work it out instead of making of this game a running headless chicken.
As somebody who has dealt with Smedley... (Score:2)
It was an absolutely critical interview, partly because we needed Sony's support behind the book to get the material we needed, and if Smedley didn't like it, the book was sunk. To make matters more interesting, this was not a book that was going to be a PR release for Sony - my editor and I were walking in with a book that was going to deal with both the good a
And, you're welcome to.. (Score:2)
Re:As somebody who has dealt with Smedley... (Score:1)
I'm not saying that videogame journalists have to be 100% critics, but far too often they appear to be in the same
Re:As somebody who has dealt with Smedley... (Score:2)
Second, you speak a bit too easily about my endorsement of the man. If you look at my posts on Slashdot alone, or my Garwulf's Corner column on Diabloii.net, you'll find that I'm not exactly easy on people who I think are full of bullshit. But I sat in the man's office, asked him difficult questions while looking into his eyes, a
What about Tinkering in EverQuest ? (Score:1)
What about Everquest? I know for a fact that the "Tinkering" skill was never finished? During a clinic at the first EQ Fanfaire I specifically asked the designer why tinkering never seemed to get any attention...and his reply was, "Yeah we never did finish that did we? Tinkering is basically a dead end at the moment"
When I got back home I simply cancelled my account and never went back.