Future Plans for SWG? 99
Warcry has a short article with impressions from someone who was asked to participate in a Star Wars Galaxies focus group. The moderator evidently presented several options, and the group responded. From the article: "The final question/topic was whether we'd choose any one of the pamphlet outlines to add to the game, or if we'd prefer for them to work on bringing things back that were taken out. As soon as he was done talking, the group said 'Rollback' almost as one. The moderator seemed like he saw that coming, because he'd probably heard the term a dozen times already from the other groups."
Re:SWG is dead. (Score:2, Interesting)
And that right there is SOE's problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Why? Well at least with the holo grind people were doing different things while grinding. The holo monkeys gave the rest of the galaxy a constant supply of fresh meat. People needing newbie weapons, needing groups to survive doing from melee to ranged.
Or did the rot set in earlier when they added the doc buffs that allowed the solo group to become the only way to play?
If SOE is going to continue, they just need to start over. Ditch this, and just start over with a new design and really choose what kind of MMO they want it to be.
The original SWG was perhaps the oddest of all MMORPG's as in that it didn't have 'levels'. You had a max number of skill points but how you spend those was up to you. It was when players started to optomize them and become super leet fighters and demanding equipment and enemies to satisfy them that the game went to hell.
At the moment the entire CU and NGE mess is caused in no small degree by the fact that the engine just isn't designed for it. It now reminds me of those quake mods that turned a fps into a flightsim or driving game. Fun for a second but they just ain't up to the task.
I'd go back to the good old days (Score:4, Interesting)
People at that time actually experimented with professions and once they found something they liked, they kept it! there were people in the cantina's, we had real people vendors making stuff, rangers hunting, BH's weren't doing much but had cool weapons, etc. This was when the game had an actual economy, people created pseudo corporations and made a killing!
The game started to go into the shitter once they gave everyone holocrons as a christmas gift. That started the real grinding evolution. A friend of mine actually did 32 professions to get his Jedi. The whole jedi thing didn't outright destroy the game because ppl still played it and worked together to grind out those professions (and some actually discovered hey i actually enjoy this profession, screw jedi). But there was still a need for the interdependicies between the professions. Armorsmiths still needed to get minerals to grind out their profession, which meant they needed architects to build the factories and the miners needed the extractors so everything worked out quite well(I used to be an armorsmith which is why i used this example).
BUt now, they have completely destroyed everything all of the pre NGE players created, everything was scaled back from 32 professions to 9 "iconic" professions (If i hear iconic, or whatever the hell word they kept using i'll puke) . It actually appeared to be the work of lazy ass people. Maybe they fucked up the game so bad that the only way to undo everything was to have this wonderful NGE.
And who the hell made the call to let everyone be a jedi. When the game first came out they said "yes you can be a jedi but it'll take you a long time to figure it out" and they kept up with it for a long time.. I think it took almost a year for the first jedi to appear and now everybody and their grandmother are a jedi.. crap!
I'd go back to the game only if I knew the same players returned, which is highly doubtful because they've probably found a new home in World Of Warcraft.
I've never seen anything in my entire life managed so poorly from a software deployment/change point of view. Hell, MS has a better track record than these clowns. And this game has totally ruined the star wars experience for me. I don't think i'll ever try another starwars game again!!
MrJynx
Poof goes the article (Score:3, Interesting)
So, literally, nothing to see here.
And now to address the crafting itself (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with crafting is this: over-simplifying it won't make it more attractive to those who weren't in that category, since it just replaces one boring grind with another equally boring grind. If anyone can make 10,000 swords a day by just clicking a "make sword" button, limited only by the quantity of ore on hand and the recipes, then you just replaced the old grind with a grind for ore and recipes. Hope you like it more when you run around looking for a tin vein, or when you get some equivalent of WoW's "collect 1000 heavy lether for the Thorium Brotherhood" grind for recipes. In the end, it just makes people do another boring grind in the same time, so it still won't be exciting to more players.
It can however piss off those who were into it in the first place, by breaking the economy. If the bottleneck is the ore, and making swords is easy, then ore prices go way up and sword prices go way down. Have you looked at the Auction House in WoW recently? At any tier, the materials sell for more than any item you could possibly make out of them. To pick a low level example so anyone can check it out without grinding to level 60, look at the materials for a low level sword: light leather, iron and stone. Now look them up at the Auction House, and look up the same sword there. Ah-ha, you could actually sell those materials for more than twice the price of the finished product.
So simplifying it didn't make it more exciting, it just made it stupid too: you're essentially throwing money out the window to pursue a crafting carreer.
It also just made farming profitable. _The_ way to make money in WoW is to farm raw materials and sell them. I fail to see this as an improvement to the game for the following reasons:
1. It's a thankless activity, other than the money itself. While a player _might_ take some pride in being the best swordsmith in town, virtually noone will feel a sense of accomplishment for farming skins and ore for 8 hours straight.
2. It's a slap in the face for those players who actually liked virtual crafting. (Call them "obsessive compulsive grinder" if you will, but you're still making them unhappy anyway.) Being told all the time "geeze, ditch smithing already and start farming if you want money for that mount" is basically denying them any sense of achievement for their virtual craftsmanship level. They're just keeping getting told that they're doing something stupid and actually counter-productive.
3. It presents a no-brainer income source for the gold farmers, and puts everyone else into direct competition with those. While you might not get annoyed that 5 other people are cooking at the same time in that room, a lot of people _will_ be annoyed when they have to compete with resources with some 5 bots farming fellcloth 24 hours a day, nuking every single NPC in sight. Heck, even without even wanting the resources, I know I've been annoyed before when I had to spend an hour killing 20 NPCs for a newbie quest because some level 60 mage was nuking them in wholesale for linen cloth.
So, at any rate, I'm predicting that the upcoming simplifying it even more in EQ2 will have the same effect. It won't make crafting more exciting. If you hate it now, I honestly think you'll still hate it just as much after the changes. Maybe it just can't be made exciting to more people. It might, however, bring in some of the annoying side effects that WoW already has.
Re:Kill it, start over, change the timeline (Score:3, Interesting)
They got UO on the ground because their lead designer was Raph Koster. Mistake #1.
He's all about lofty overarching designs...which have trouble being translated into something programmatically feasible.