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Kindred Spirits Forum -> News -> Setting of the Twin Suns
Post Info TOPIC: Setting of the Twin Suns
Montsalvat


KS loudmouth

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Date: Jun 29, 2011
Setting of the Twin Suns
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Setting of the Twin Suns
 
(copied from the facebook site)
Setting of the Twin Suns

On December 15, 2011, certain groups of friends who may never have met in person, will head to their favourite places, look out over familiar, perhaps beloved vistas for the last time and mourn quietly as the company that hosts t...hem turns out the lights, closing the first MMO for fans of George Lucas' immense space opera., Star Wars: Galaxies. The twin suns that first rose for the public in June of 2003 will set over a distant, virtual desert world for the last time.

The closure of Star Wars: Galaxies marks a long and troubled path for a game that struggled to maintain its vision and popular appeal through countless developer and producer shifts, and twice major revamping of the game's combat systems and structure. As with many MMOs, SW:G had its early and enthusiastic proponents, and equally vociferous opponents: many found the first publishes of the game to be bug-laden and clunky, and many were very disappointed that it took six months for the space combat expansion to be released, although once that update was introduced, it very quickly set the standard of MMO ship-to-ship combat.

On the plus side, the game was wonderfully immersive, designed to be as open-ended and adaptable as the players could make it. Every object was a fully realised three-dimensional model that could be manipulated in the player's home, players could form cities and decorate them with gardens, fountains and streetlights, even as they could decorate the interiors of their in-game homes with crafted furniture, paintings and looted objects. Even the character avatars were customisable, maintaining only gender and species, but adjustable weight, height, features, skin, hair and scales. SW:G was envisioned and advertised as a place where you could bounty hunt like Boba Fett, dwell in the desert like Uncle Owen, and do everything in between: the first true sand box for online players to explore the worlds of their favourite space saga, and live their own epic stories.

The popularity of the social aspects of the game can be seen in numerous videos of cantina crawls and large scale battles, even music videos, featuring avatars for dancers and musicians and the many iconic settings to be found in the game. The player-driven economy was a first, and many aspects of the game, such as decorating with virtual objects and harvesting resources on specific timers have become hallmarks of very successful social site games, from Neopets to Farmville. There are even patents on aspects of the programming and world generation: SW:G was a ground breaker in many ways.

Issues with the combat system caused a revamp of certain aspects in March of 2005, called the Combat Upgrade, and this triggered the first outcry from the players, the first realization that their feelings of ownership of their virtual space in game were not being considered by the company. The combat upgrade sped up combat and removed many actions from the pool, balancing combat a little better, but also removed popular and desired features like medical crafting, and wounds. It was also the first mass exodus from SW:G: many players logged out the night of the CU and never logged back in again.

The real shocker was just around the corner. Barely six months after the CU, and before the players had truly adjusted to the new system, inspired by the sudden rocketing success of World of Warcraft, LA and SOE re-examined the game yet again, and opted to redesign it practically from the ground up. They simplified many of its systems into a much less variable, more regimented style of play, and creating linear quests to encourage leveling by following a single particular storyline (which petered out about half way through the leveling process. Additional chapters of that questline and more modules to get players from level 45-80 were added much later.)

With the NGE, instead of innumerable profession combinations (A Chef could take some combat skills so she could hunt her own meat, for example; or a Dancer could also design clothing, etc.), players became limited to one of 7 combat professions, or Entertainer or Trader, which were designated iconic professions of the Star Wars milieu. If you were a Chef you were also a Tailor. If you were a healing Doctor, you were also an offensive Combat Medic. Jedi became a starter profession option (in direct opposition to the canon of the milieu, which posits that the Jedi were almost wiped out, and the few hidden survivors were hunted by the Empire), instead of a secretive and mysterious procedure whereby you had to trade experience for hidden Force skills. This style of cookie-cutter classing was a narrowing and gross oversimplification of the very customizability that gave the game tremendous appeal, and marked it as very different from the rest of the pack of MMOs. (From the perspective of a roleplaying gamer, it would be like taking an established campaign of third edition D&D and reverting all player characters back to the first edition.)

They were in the middle of a planned expansion, but the teams working on the two aspects didn't seem to communicate at all, resulting in the expansion contained rewards and content for professions and functions the NGE removed completely from the game, two weeks after the release of the expansion.

This turned out to be an epic error, a corporate misjudgment of New Coke proportions, but SOE did not follow the example set then, and refused to roll back the much disliked New Game Enhancement to a version of Classic SW:G, or as was suggested by many players, for the company to maintain the original version of SW:G and releasing the new version as SW:G II, as SOE had done when they revamped their steadily successful fantasy MMO franchise, Everquest.

Understandably, with these immense changes coming only two weeks after the release of a major new expansion (purchased separately from the on-going subscription fee), a large section of the player base felt brutally betrayed, there was a massive outcry and many refunds had to be paid to stave off a breach of contract suit, and continuing their loud, vocal protests over how the changes were handled, player subscriptions plummeted. Once-populous servers became ghost towns, and many new players trying the game out for the first time got the impression it was very sparsely populated. In addition, it was clear certain aspects of the changes hadn't been thought through, much less thoroughly balance tested. With the addition a few months later of the expertise panes, minor customization of the classes became possible, as well as key-mapping options to better use the game's particular interfaces, and the game turned a corner and began to get better: the potetial of the new combat engine began to be seen and enjoyed more fully, and at that point the bleed of subscribers halted and the player population began to stabilize..

This phase of the game's life proved to hide another, much more subtle error made by the executives at LA and SOE, in that they did nothing to stem the tide of vocal disapproval from their once-loyal playerbase. Those ex-subscribers were not the target audience of the new battle plan of SW:G: the new combat engine was fast-twitch, almost first-person-shooter, and was definitely geared to the hordes of gamers who enjoyed that style of play and didn't mind the cookie-cutter class system or the lack of variety in character abilities. The majority of original subscribers left in droves, and took their sense of disenfranchisement with them, but they refused to go silently.

In many notable cases, they continued to haunt SOE, following up on press announcements, new game reviews and even fan videos posted to YouTube with continued expressions of anger and betrayal over the NGE debacle, spreading bad press about the company and discouraging curious fans from trying it out. Over the course of years, the message pervaded the 'Net that SOE was not to be trusted, and that SWG was a terrible game. It is a model of how relevant a few particular old cliches can be to the digital age: the best form of advertising is word of mouth, no news travels like bad news, and with no clear media damage control following up on the negative comments, SW:G never got a second chance to make a first impression.

Some two years after the NGE, John Smedley, the CEO of SOE went public with a carefully worded apology for the admitted error of the NGE, but the company made no gesture to assuage the feelings of those lost subscribers. They continued to post vitriolic comments every chance they got, often flaming blogs or videos or fan pages of the game with their extremely negative opinion of the company ad the changes to the game they had loved.. Even with solid work being done on SW:G by some very talented developers under the leadership of approachable and communicative producers, which managed to meet many desires of the current active subscribers while still adding fresh new content, the reputation of the game was well sunk into a losing spiral.

It is a testament to those developers and the positive members of the player community that the game had maintained steady subscriptions over its last three years, and even noticeable gains after various special offers and events. Industry insiders noted the passion of the active SW:G community, and as newer games were developed, many of the community-building models that SW:G promoted so successfully have been implemented in other big-title games, witness the success and usefulness of official forums for LotRO, as well as the positive and proactive support sites for that game. MMOs as an industry subset cannot ignore the power of a motivated community: they do so to their detriment and often, swift closure.

The publisher SOE had its hands full earlier this year with a significant lay-off of over 200 employees, and then a serious hack of many of its subscriber files; one of the first in a series of criminal computer attacks on major corporations. The news releases and regular follow-up notices from the company, and the sheer size of the stories triggered an ongoing wave of negative posts concerning the NGE, a full 5 and a half years after the changes were made. This is symptomatic of the capabilities and long memories of this segment of the market, and it may have been the factor SOE could no longer ignore regarding how SW:G was being presented to the larger gaming market.

The impression that LucasArts was the pressure point behind the NGE and indeed the current closure announcement is not helping that company, either. The closure notification and follow-up interviews stated that it was a mutual business decision, that LucasArts would prefer not to have conflicting MMOs on the market for the same franchise (BioWare's Star Wars The Old Republic is postulated to be scheduled for release December 17, two days after the final server closure of SW:G. Recently, BioWare reps were still posting on their new game's forums that they expected along very little conflict from players of SW:G, because the games are so different: TOR looks to be designed very linear story arcs, and has little in the way of a free-range sand-box approach.

The alliance with LucasArts, which many have referred to as a license to print money because of the enduring popularity and all-ages appeal of the Star Wars franchise had became an endless source of embarassment for SOE and its parent company, Sony, yet SOE must maintain it, due not only to the power of the franchise in the media, but also because they continue to actively develop the FreeRealms: Star Wars: Clone Wars MMO adventure platform for younger gamers. Ignoring the culpability of the executives who pushed the NGE through a good six months before it was ready and against the wishes of their subscribers, SW:G is seen as the source of the drama, therefore it was the easiest to let go of; with the license held until June of next year, and even though the game remains profitable enough to support a producer and talented development team.

That last point is the single most confusing factor for the players who are reeling from the announcement. In our society, everyone understands that a product that no longer sells is not worth keeping on the shelves, but if a product is doing well enough to maintain its market share, especially considering the age and reputation of the product, what motivations are there for closing it down? That question players are asking every day, creating emotional videos and blogs, even firing up a petition, a support group on FaceBook, and an in-person protest at SOE's annual Fan Faire to encourage LA and SOE to reconsider the shut-down

Whether these efforts will prove fruitful remains to be seen, but the strongly stated feelings of players are that the only way to fail is to not have tried. With the awareness that the NGE was an error because of the failure to consult their subscribers, one would assume the companies were not willing to risk the same outcry, but the announcement of the shutdown for less-than-clear motivations belies that assumption. In addition, articles regarding the interaction of the BioWare product and SW:G are surfacing and are shocking in their incorrect postulations that TOR will not have an impact on the decisions regarding SW:G's future.

This story has so many twists and turns and angles that one could write about it all day, and still be surprised by what they find as they research the history of the game, and the partnership of the companies SOE and LA. This closure sets precedents that every MMO publisher will be paying attention to, and as such, affects the players of every subscription-based game on the market, now and in the future.
 


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Martijn


Forum Troller

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Date: Jun 30, 2011
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Fun reading material. Who wrote it?

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Montsalvat


KS loudmouth

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Date: Jun 30, 2011
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Must have been one of the mods of the Save SWG facebook site, since there is not a specific author visible.

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Montsalvat


KS loudmouth

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Date: Jul 7, 2011
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Here is the comment fom Ralph Koster, a former developer of SWG:

http://www.raphkoster.com/2011/06/24/swg-is-shutting-down/

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Montsalvat


KS loudmouth

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Date: Jul 15, 2011
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LucasArts' Message to Star Wars Galaxies Fans:

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/221126/lucasarts-message-to-star-wars-galaxies-fans/

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Coahake


Senior Member

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Date: Jul 15, 2011
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It sounds to me almost like SOE couldn't afford to pay LucasArts their blood money

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Martijn


Forum Troller

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Posts: 1122
Date: Jul 15, 2011
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well i got something new to do now :)

New Google News Badges Service Launches In The US (video)

By Julian Horsey on Friday 15th July 2011 12:22 pm in Technology News

Google has this week introduced a new service called Badges for US Google account holders, which now allows them to earn badges as they read articles on Google News. If youre signed-in to a Google account and have web history enabled, you will earn badges as you click on articles in Google News. Both desktop and mobile clicks earn you badges.

The new Google News badges feature is private by default, but you can configure settings to share his badges with friends via social networking sites, if desired and when Google+ goes main stream expect Badges to play a part within Googles new social network as well.

 



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STARKSET


Starky's cool name when he comes up with one

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Date: Jul 19, 2011
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mmmmm is this true then?


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