Broken
Toys
Random comments about
games and tractors
Good Apollo, Dear God The Internet It Burns IV: Srsly, Dude
(Edit: it appears that bells are unringing, or at least the subject of this note took to heart some of the no doubt polite and reasoned criticism that arrived in his email and throughout the Intertubes. In particular, the everything-was-screwed-up-but-what-I-did parts were replaced with an honest mea culpa. So, as you read this, realize that I’m beating up on someone who’s trying to make good on his mistakes. And after that, I might go and punch some babies or something.)
Dear Mr. Rubenfield (I don’t really know you well enough to call you “Dan” and definitely not well enough to call you “Lord_Pall” like some internet weirdo):
OK, you can blame friends who should know better for baiting me into responding seriously. Despite the fact that SWG in general, and the NGE in specific, is basically the Derek Smart of MMO discussion. You bring it up and all the oxygen of coherent discussion just is sucked out of the room. Flames do that.
And why is that? Because in the space of two weeks from the player’s perspective, the entire structure of SWG was tossed aside and replaced with what you freely admit was the result of a few weeks’ mad crunching.
We told them. “If you do this, you will lose all 200k subscribers. It is that significant.”
It was explained that we would gain more due to the marketing push and relaunch.
So, we pushed forward.
Dude. Srsly. You CAN’T DO THAT.
At some point someone – your producer, probably, that being his job and all – should have sat everyone down and said “you. can’t. do. that.”
Those 200,000 customers – customers - you blithely dismiss as “dregs” and “weirdos” – are paying your salary. You can’t just blow them off for the mythical millions of people looking for a better game. Want to make a better game for them? Sure. As you said:
“Can you change an MMO drastically after it launches?”
Categorically, NO.
If we were to do it again, and wanted to make those types of changes, you have to make a new game.
Relaunch with a new title.
Or shut down Galaxies and relaunch for real.
You cannot change it at runtime.
And if you had kept your blog entry at that – just that – it would have all been cool. Hey, the designer of the NGE learned a valuable lesson. You can’t yoink a game and replace it with candy. Even if the candy is yummy. SCRUMPTIOUSLY. The customers – customers - not freaks or weirdos, customers – paid for a game. Not candy. They are paying a monthly fee for a game.
Maybe none of the team LIKED that game particularly. Maybe the higher ups were demanding millions of subscribers to pay for Lucasarts licensing fees. I dunno. I wasn’t there. You were.
But… dude. Srsly. YOU CAN’T DO THAT.
Especially this. Dude. Srsly.
We launched, the marketing push failed, and we lost subscribers.
It was a misread at an organizational level. Marketing, Production, community. You name it.
Epoch grade fuckup.
But.
The fuckup was NOT the changes.
Oh, no, you didn’t.
Oh, no, you didn’t.
You didn’t just point the finger for NGE’s commercial failure at everyone but yourself.
OH NO, YOU DIDN’T.
“It was a marketing failure.” (yeah, marketing makes or breaks games, plus everybody dislikes marketing, it’s easy to blame them!)
“Community dropped the ball.” (yeah, you know, the community person who was FIRED a week after trying to deflect the rage of a community, who for SOME STRANGE REASON en masse felt betrayed. I WONDER WHY.)
Dude. Srsly.
You completely changed the game. You ripped out the guts and replaced it with random bits from other systems. With two weeks notice to a community that you just sold an expansion pack to.
No, really, I’m sure there’s enough blame to go around. I’m sure marketing dropped the ball. I’m sure community could have been handled better (pro-tip: letting them know a bit further in advance may have been a good idea).
But your design – your work – was so smash up wonderful that everyone BUT you was to fault? Everyone BUT you was to blame?
Srsly. Dude.
So. Your final anecdote:
A cancellation email from UO came in. A diatribe, really.
It want on and on about how shitty the game was, how it was the worst piece of crap he’d ever played.
So, someone called him to find out some information.
They asked how long he played for.
His answer?
2 years.
So, what lesson did you get from that, anyway? Because, judging from the rest of your post?
I suspect you didn’t get it. Srsly.
DUDE.
Regards,
Scott Jennings
| Print article |
about 2 years ago
/signed.
about 2 years ago
Wow, that guy’s blog is just poor form. Who writes stuff like that, especially after royally screwing up what could have been an awesome MMO?
about 2 years ago
I never understood why people consider Raph Koster and company to be the Jesus of MMOs. UO sucked, SWG sucked. Rubenfield seems to have the same attitude of “We made an awesome game, it’s not our fault that the customers didn’t like it. Fuck those retards!”
This takes the cake though, “The fuckup was NOT the changes.” Yeah, because marketing poorly will cause subscribers to cancel. Right. I fully support the idea of taking the “Raphy goodness” out of MMOs, because, well… His rhetoric is nice, but the man has yet to make a game I enjoyed.
about 2 years ago
This guy.
He posts
as if he
were Captain Kirk.
It would all be so much better in haiku form.
about 2 years ago
Oh, hi Lum, nice to see you posting again.
about 2 years ago
“It would all be so much better in haiku form.”
I was thinking Hellgate:London NPC dialogue box.
about 2 years ago
When told “change the game by doing this or you are fired” I’m not sure I could have done any better.
Look on the bright side: you no longer have to catass for 2 years, or launch KotOR to be a Jedi.
about 2 years ago
Actually, I thought he was clear on understanding the point: Do this and you lose all 200K subscribers. Management said “Bah! We can win them ALL!” And then they didn’t.
To the question of “Can you change the nature of a game?”, the answer is an emphatic no.
“Was SW:G:NGE better than SW:G?” He says yes. He might be right, that the changes made it a fun game and it all would have been fine if it had been packaged as “Star Wars Galaxies 2: This Time We Shoot People More”. He might be wrong. It’s impossible to make a fair comparison. Arguably, if they’d released NGE as a separate, stand-alone product, they might have won it all.
But the problem wasn’t the nature of the NGE — the problem is that they deleted SWG to make room for it, and screwed over all the current players. Whether or not the NGE was any good was never the issue.
about 2 years ago
I don’t understand his logic path.
He asserts that the error was not in the changes, but in not thinking first if it was a good idea?
about 2 years ago
Yes, the blog has problems, but there is a larger lesson.
SWG got itself between a rock and a hard place.
It had 200K subscribers, declining at 10K/month. If the setting WEREN’T Star Wars (IP owned by Lucas), most MMO companies would have lived with the low subscriber numbers and tailored the experience to the community they had. (Much as SL has tailored to its player base.)
However, one can easily imagine Lucas threatening to pull the rights to the Star Wars name because of the low player numbers (etc.), forcing SOE to do something, no matter how extreme.
So for my larger issue: Not only does using someone else’s IP (Star Wars, Middle Earth, D&D, Conan, Harry Potter, etc.) come at a financial cost, AND limits to creative freedom from the get-go, it also means that the game team CAN’T READILY ADAPT to the players that show up. This was never a problem with single-player games because they’re merely built and forgotten, no adaption is necessary/possible.
To create a hypothetical example: What if LOTRO’s players decide en-masse that they want to be the bad guys and burn hobbitton to the ground? Turbine’s management/design team might be perfectly happy to allow players to do this, but whoever currently owns LOTR’s IP certainly won’t allow it. Thus, the game suffers.
about 2 years ago
Good idea, instead of using someone else’s IP, let’s make another Tolkienesque game. People like wizards, right?
OK, I’m being stupid, but I can’t help complain that there is a glut of swords and sorcery games. For people creating MMOs in an “original” setting (ie not someone else’s IP), it seems that D&D-type stuff is all these nerds know.
about 2 years ago
To create a hypothetical example: What if LOTRO’s players decide en-masse that they want to be the bad guys and burn hobbitton to the ground?
I think you picked the one example that is perfectly lore-consistent. It would violate nothing in continuity for them to create a Scouring of the Shire instanced quest for the monster side. They already have plenty of villainous humans and dwarves throughout the game, so you could port the current freep classes to the creep side without much issue. You could even make the monster side Guild Wars: insta-50 for PvP, or level for PvE content.
My apologies for a mild threadjack.
about 2 years ago
I think SWG and LOTRO have both proved that there really isn’t a huge boost to be had from using a well-known IP’s lore.
World of Warcraft proved, among other things, that you really don’t need a well-known IP anyway, so the disadvantages are definitely not worth it when you can have fabulous success without it. Let’s face it, Warcraft’s lore is freaking goofy and always was, but no one cares.
“People don’t want A story. They want THEIR story.”
about 2 years ago
I hear if you stand in front of a mirror and say “New Game Enhancements” three times, John Smedley appears and rearranges all the furniture in your house.
about 2 years ago
If anybody is faced with this in the future, here’s something to try.
Print out the names of all 200,000 subscribers. Tell the Guys In Suits that these are the ones giving them money next month.
Then ask the Guys In Suits to produce 200,000 names to replace them.
about 2 years ago
World of Warcraft proved that a strong, established franchise *does* work wonders. Every Warcraft game released since 1994 has been a hit.
Moreover, the Blizzard name is extremely influential, given their fantastic portfolio of hit products. Diablo set the standard in 1997 for action role-playing games. Diablo II raised the bar again in 2000. Released in 1998, StarCraft continues to be considered the premier real-time strategy game.
A number of factors contributed, and contribute, to the success of World of Warcraft. These factors include the authenticity of the Warcraft franchise and the reputation of Blizzard Entertainment.
about 2 years ago
nice CoCa reference mang ;p
and nice rant
about 2 years ago
I gotta give the guy some credit. The guys at the top said “we want the game redone, and this is how your going to do it”. Period. He didn’t get a say; just a few weeks to redo essentially everything. I think his point is: He did that, and he didn’t do a bad job of it considering the circumstances.
Maybe, maybe not. I never played.
The NGE idea, of course – was absolutely pants-on-head retarded. What would they expect:
When you’ve got a new system designed in implemented in a couple of weeks; your going to get shit.
When you pull the rug out from your entire player base, your going to get alot of pissed off people.
When an ‘expansion’ to small time mmo comes out, especially in the shadow of WOW, your not gonna get much hype or interest. There’s a reason launches make or break games.
When you send 200k pissed off people out into the wilds of teh internet, they’re gonna rant on every blog, forum and chat about what a bunch of garbage your new changes are, and it’s not going to take much to convince people your expansion isn’t worth getting when they’ve already decided your game wasn’t worth playing years ago.
My point: Even if the NGE was a fantastic upgrade, it wouldn’t have been successful. Given that they gave their dev team a couple weeks to actually hack it together, that it didn’t crash and consume the sun was a small miracle in itself.
about 2 years ago
I wonder… In 50 years, will people still be bringing up the NGE issue?
Anywho, this seems to be a pretty fitting response to the article, all things considered. I also agree. Had he stopped when you suggested, the article wouldn’t have been nearly so bad – in fact, it actually would have been pretty good. Then it didn’t.
Still, he did put a lot of emphasis on blaming himself early on at least.
about 2 years ago
I love the Coheed reference.
about 2 years ago
This is one of the reasons why I’m against giving designers the ability to write scripts in an MMO. If SWG hadn’t had a robust scripting system, the designers wouldn’t have been able to abuse it to create the NGE.
about 2 years ago
I agree with some of Raelyf’s points. Yes, Scott, the producer should have sat everyone down and said, “You can’t do that”, but if experience has taught me anything, it’s that a driven executive would fire the producer and place a yes-man in position until the whole debacle is complete. I’d like to think that all business decisions are well thought out and made with a sense of respect toward others in the organization, but having been through an organizational fire sale once, the pride and emotions of one arrogant prick can make things pretty rough going.
That being said, as was mentioned above, NGE as a separate product may have been a good release, but could SW:G survive that, too? The game was going down the tubes. Marketing was doing a lousy job, and the IP was handled horribly. Not to mention that (and here I risk the wrath of dorks everywhere) the Star Wars IP is so campy and ridiculous at times that it probably wasn’t the best one to use for a MMOG. That’s my opinion, though.
As for the effect of marketing on a game, I would argue that World of Market^H^H^H^H^H^HWarcraft has had great success due to Blizzard’s marketing campaigns. The franchise itself had a huge following to start, so that didn’t hurt, but it is not a far cry from standard fantasy Diku fare, so how do you keep people coming back for more? Good PR and marketing. I think a lot of the problems that resulted from NGE were coincidental due to other factors. NGE was a huge contributor, but certainly not the only one.
about 2 years ago
Arrakiv: “I wonder… In 50 years, will people still be bringing up the NGE?”
Dear God, let’s hope so.
about 2 years ago
Everyone knows when blame time comes it’s hard to turn the almighty figure on yourself. Lots of ego involved anyway, and I’d wager if one of the marketing guys had a blog he’d be blaming everyone but the marketing. Just the way it goes.
I will say after reading his blog I think he’s kind of a douche though. Neither here, nor there. Just sayin.
about 2 years ago
Peter Griffin-style.
http://mythicalblog.com/downloads/hello.php
about 2 years ago
Funcom is making the same mistake. http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=80378
about 2 years ago
Alright, fiiine fiiiin fiine. I’ll come clean. NGE was all MY fault. No one else had a hand in it but ME. Blame ME. Jesus, I know I don’t care about this crap anymore. I liked SWG before NGE and guess what, I like SWG after NGE too because I’m not a grudge holding dickface. Now, sure, it wasn’t right but I mean come on, who would still be playing it anyway (people you would want to make fun of, amirite?)
The game was good enough at the time, it’s good enough now. I mean shit, they’ve still got goldfarmer problems, that has gotta say somethin about NGE.
In conclusion: People need to smoke more pot so that it’s easier to forget shit like this and move on with your exciting MMO lives of repetition.
Thank you all, and have a wonderful day.
about 2 years ago
P.S. I love you Mr. Jennings
about 2 years ago
/shrug
A lot of people who’ve never actually done anything successfully at their jobs think they are THE experts who should tell others how to succeed.
I see “expert failures” all over the country, as I move from one big pharma merger to next big big pharma merger and you know what? If I can’t fire them, I ignore them. I prefer people who’ve succeeded at things telling me what is or is not the best thing to do here and now.
Just saying really. This Rubenfield comes off as an expert failure, and not very bright… If he doesn’t want to come off that way he should write less or think more carefully about what he writes.
about 2 years ago
“so how do you keep people coming back for more? Good PR and marketing.”
And that malarkey is why we keep getting buggy crap thrown at us instead of polished, FINISHED games. WoW was not an unprecedented and unimaginable success at launch because some marketing weinie came up with the perfect sales pitch. It was because it was GOOD. It was fun, stable, designed in such a way that asshats couldn’t ruin your evening, ran without a hitch on (almost) everyone’s computer, had more than enough content polished and complete at the outset to last 99.9% of all players for months, and neither the game nor the company did any stupid shit that would embarass you in front of all your non-MMO experienced friends who you talked into trying the game.
Blizzard could have thrown a bazillion dollars into marketing WoW and it still wouldn’t have been nearly the success it was if they had shipped a buggy pos like of most other MMOs ever released. Likewise Blizzard could have saved all their marketing budget and thrown themselves a month-long party with money hats and blow and hookers for everyone and not spent a dime beyond making sure the game was on store shelves for people to buy, and it would still have been an outstanding success, as long as it was released in the state it actually was. Oh, I don’t doubt they got their money back from their investment in marketing. But I’m certain they got orders of magnitude more return on every dollar spent testing and polishing than on marketing.
about 2 years ago
I had heard early on that Rubenfield was one of three people who actually liked and pushed for the NGE changes. I remember reading his “YOU ARE NOW ON NOTICE” post in April and wondered why no one reacted to it.
I figure people just thought, hey, guy had to fuck off to Finland for a job, maybe that was penance enough.
about 2 years ago
SCOTT JENNINGS DOES NOT UPDATE ANYMORE. IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, YOU CAN SIT IN THE CORNER AND EAT A BAG OF DICKS.
seriously though,
You know what my favorite part of this whole thing is? The Derek Smart reference. Poor Derek. Can’t a dude fade into obscurity without being brought up every time some game designer makes an ass out of himself on the intarwebs?
about 2 years ago
SWG was not declining at 10k users per month, POST-CU SWG was declining at 10k users per month.
The fuckup was the CU (Combat Upgrade – not a combat upgrade, but the conversion of a sandbox into a diku while turning 15 months’ worth of lovingly crafted in-game items into worthless junk). It destroyed the game people had been playing.
The CU demolished my guild, the crafting role of my character, and my fun. Some months later, they tried to save SWG by doing the NGE, and now that’s all anyone remembers.
about 2 years ago
Re: Morgan Ramsay
While Blizzard and Warcraft may be household words for us social maladapts, compared to LotR and Star Wars? They’re small time.
In any case, the point is that you’re better off with an IP you’ve developed in house, rather than having to work with someone else’s Vision ™. As I hear it, this was why Cryptic couldn’t make the Marvel MMO work; too much Marvel sticking their fingers in the pie.
–Toasty
about 2 years ago
Quote:
Poor Derek. Can’t a dude fade into obscurity without being brought up every time some game designer makes an ass out of himself on the intarwebs?
Answer:
NO. fear of a lifetime of ridicule for an epic failure is the only thing that keeps some developers from implementing 4-crack bag ideas, and pushing them out the door when they fail.
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
about 2 years ago
Im afraid that now im going to need an example of a “4-crack bag” idea. For science.
about 2 years ago
SWG NGE is what we like to call “Embracing the abandonment of existing demographics for a younger, newer, wider or different demographic”.
If you are someone who is in a position to potentially make drastic changes to an already existing franchise, and you have no grasp or concept of what the fuck made people enjoy said franchise, then you have no fucking business turning the game into something which doesn’t even appeal to the people whom are part of your initially established fanbase.
about 2 years ago
Permadeath. I would argue that the fetuspult would be another 4-bagger. Thankfully neither of these have been implemented outside of a college project. Unfortuately the 4-bagger that we have been talking about WAS implemented.
about 2 years ago
Just wow.
“And yes, all 200k of you were important, but 200k means nothing in the
scheme of things.”
Really? Cuz up until WoW, 200K was a pretty nice chunk of the MMO market. There were/are MMOs that operate on 200K or less and do quite well for themselves.
Sure, they’re not 10million+ WoW – but nobody is.
This just screams of “we wanted more money”
“Hell, I implemented the original Jedi System in 2 weeks after we
launched. Not because it was how we wanted it, but because we had 2
weeks to do it.”
He seems to say that with pride, which is confusing to me.
As a former player of SWG, and a huge Star Wars geek, Jedi were the first design issue to cause the downfall of your game. (Note i say design, there were plenty of bugs, etc that contributed to its demise)
about 2 years ago
As someone who was a “victim” of the SWG rehash, I’ll make some comments.
SWG just before the Trials of Obi-Wan expansion was a wonderful thing. It was the buggiest MMO on the market at the time, but we, the players were holding out hope that eventually these things would be quashed. SWG had a great community, and it also had spaceship travel too.
When they announced the changes, I thought it was a joke. I didn’t even rexognize it as a possibility that they would convert a carefully crafted MMO into some kind of hybrid twich-based shooter. That all my skillpoints that I had worked for were now useless and I had to grind all over again.
If they would have just fixed all the bugs that game had, they could have kept plenty of subscribers, and gained more people.
I suppose history is the proof. Nobody plays SWG now, that’s because it sucks.
about 2 years ago
Space is stupid. Space stuff just doesn’t sell. It’s very, very EXTREME niche. Like, a tiny percentage of the people who do games. There’s a reason why you have 10 million in the Middle Ages in WoW, 8 million in little funny suburban rec rooms and realistic modern stuff in Habo Hotel, etc. Look, I tried doing space myself in SL and I still maintain one space thing, but…Space…doesn’t sell. Maybe on TV it does, but…are you sure?
I’m all for standing up to idiot game gods and indifferent community hacks, but at the end of the day, who’s going to pay for your game? It’s not enough.
I’m also brimming with curiosity to know if Tigger, who left TSO back in the day (Dragon’s Cove, anyone?) to go to SWG was part of the community mess-up there or whether she is long gone. Anyone?
about 2 years ago
As always when the terror of SWG is brought up, I have to repeat that I have zero sympathy for disaffected players of the game. Most of you knew full well that you were buying a swiftly-digested scheme to cash in on the popularity of EQ/UO and Star Wars. You saw the game footage of the “combat” which looked suspiciously like EQ with blasters. You bought a game whose core game mechanic was the phrase “leveraging synergies.”
What the flux did you expect was going to happen? In that sense, I almost (almost) can’t blame the execs who green-lighted NGE. They were just trying to realize the ultimate vision of their game. No, not Vision, just vision: even more Star Wars fans.
about 2 years ago
You spoke the name of Derek Smart and… Prokofy Neva appeared. Did you burn the wrong incense or something?
Sci-fi space games sell just fine. Master of Orion, the X-Wing series, Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect – all popular, all space-y.
I played SW:G all of once. An itinerant hairstylist messed up the horns on my head, and my wife’s abominable snow-wookie was sexually harassed by a Mon Calamari in the alleys of Mos Eisley. I played music while she danced for money, but she had a face like someone had hit her with a shovel, so the credits didn’t exactly pour in.
It was definitely … unique.
about 2 years ago
he took away the candy and gave us human fecal matter.
about 2 years ago
Solution: Release a SWG Classic Server.
about 2 years ago
Demand for “Classic”, “Legacy”, or “Progression” servers are signs that your game is completely out of new ideas and is running on dimly remembered nostalgia. Its a dead-end and may as well be a gigantic road-sign for players ~ “GAME EXIT – NO FURTHER DEVELOPMENT AHEAD”.
The only reason that SWG does not have one YET (and this guy admits that the pre-NGE and pre-CU codes are still there), is that a classic pre-CU/pre-NGE server is the ultimate admission that SOE / LA devs and management were utter lying, cheating, unscrupulous, talentless hack weasels ~ and that all the things that the players said about them during the NGE mess were true. I would think that SOE and LA would rather shut down the whole game and start anew rather than do that.
PS:
I rather agree with the people that say that the pre-NGE SWG was no great shakes either. It was a mediocre game at best that had some good points to keep some people playing ~ completely and utterly niche. I also don’t understand why Raph is held in such high esteem around the MMOG blogosphere. As far as I am concerned, his record as a game dev is pretty mediocre when examined closely. He talks a good talk though.
about 2 years ago
@ubvman and anyone else who keeps asking….
The old code is gone. GONE.
What Dan was saying was they had to work in parallel with the existing code at the time in case they decided at the last minute not to pull the trigger and launch the NGE. Once it was launched, the old code ceased to exist.
about 2 years ago
selling vowels cheap /pst
about 2 years ago
The old code is gone? If Sony management allowed a multi-million dollar software project to develop a single line of code without first establishing a robust code-management system including, at a minimum, a version control system, build/integration management procedures, and regular backups, then they are incompetent idiots. And if they did, and the developers didn’t do those things themselves, then THEY are incompetent idiots.
And if there is one thing the whole sordid story of SWG certainly proves, it’s that neither the developers nor the management were incompetent idiots!
Oh, wait.
(hey, where’s my green font button?)
The ONLY way the statment “the old code is gone” can be spun as anything but a bald-faced lie is to interpret it as meaning “the old code is not currently installed on any servers or development platforms”. Gone as in irretrieveable would probably be grounds for a shareholder lawsuit aginst the management for negligence.
about 2 years ago
I’m a little surprised that Scott doesn’t catch what isn’t being said between the lines when Dan said this:
The first statement has an actor, the second statement doesn’t.
Then, there is the itsy, bitsy, silent-but-deadly final work of the second sentence.
about 2 years ago
As someone who played before NGE, and has played for quite a bit afterwards (though I have “quit” twice), I have a few things to say.
First off, the NGE as it currently stands, is a million times better than the initial launch of it, but it still sucks. Up until a few days ago, someone at SOE had made a major blunder, and had allowed a bit of coding to slip though, that allowed people to have absolutely no cooldown for any specials, and everyone decided to have server wide PVP wars, where EVERYONE was abusing this to hell. The same bugs that were there before NGE are still there (Specials not firing, characters getting stuck in random areas, etc). But even with these massive fuckups, it is getting better. They have taken out most of (but not all) of the ‘Twitch-based shooting’ and re-implemented auto-aim and auto-fire. Professions have some variants with the Expertise system. The problem being, that alot of the Expertise was half-assed as well, and almost everyone takes one of two viable options, anything else, and you are fish bait anywhere. So yes, the game still has problems.
Secondly, if I remember right, the NGE was in devolpment for over six months, according to the Letter from the head Dev at the time. Basically we were all told that the NGE was planned from the get go, and the CU was just a slight shift towards it, by dumbing things down, and making it less complex, with the NGE being the final dumbing down of the game. We had 32 professions which you could mix and match (personally, it was fun being a Doctor, Bounty Hunter, and Creature Handler at the same time), and we are now down to 9, 12 if you include the different Crafter class variants. Jedi was taken from being an unlocked Epic class, to being a starting profession, with all “Elder Jedi” given bath robes for their months of hard work.
The current dev team headed by Deadmeat, seems to have their heads in the right place sometimes, and the rest of the time, it still seems to be firmly planted up their ass. They implement something great, and then they implement something that no one asked for, that sucks horribly, and we find ourselves asking “WTF?!”. As for the 200k subs number, with as many people as I know, that have multiple accounts, I really have to wonder exactly how many people still play this game.
The NGE discussion will last for quite some time, hell its already been 2+ years. It will last for one major reason, a lesson to people of just how to fuck up a decent game, for something that they think will work, without really focusing on what DOES work. They cant even get more people to play, because by now pretty much everyone knows what they did, and new players have to wonder “could they do it again?” “Could the game I am about to play cease to exit and become something else?”. They dont have the product on store shelves, and the current download off of their site is months and possibly years behind on updates, and takes about 24-26 hours on a 7 meg pipeline to update (yes, I had to do this). What they need now, more than anything, is to focus on the people that are still here, that still play this game, that have fun with it (occasionaly), and for fucks sake, FIX THE BUGS. Then maybe they will have a product that will be worth the time of putting on shelves, and getting more people to play.
about 1 year ago
The commets here reflect the article title and its introduction.
Behold the greatness of the Internet: the flaming masses, seemingly haven’t even read Mr. Rubenfield’s posting, rush to condone, scold and so on Mr. Rubenfield based on a few cleverly picked pieces of text excerpted(sp?) by Mr. Jennings, self-admittedly, to beat upon this dead horse.
This may come as a shock to some of you, but Mr. Rubenfield also wrote:
“Note – To those who think I might be pointing fingers. I say it out loud, Italicized and Bold.
I fucked it up.”
And it is also made quite clear that he has opposed the streamlining of characters and that what he is proud about is that he had done an incredible work to adhere to the specifications given to him by the XOs – which he had no word on the matter.
Furthermore, it would seem to me that most of the arguments here are more pointed at the management rather than at Mr. Rubenfield, who is NOT part of management, so basically, this a a case of shooting the messenger, or whomever poor person who is in the unfortunate position of being the only accessible icon of a large(ly hated) corporation.
P.S.
I may be nigh half a year late, but better than never.
P.P.S.
Hi Georgia, congratulations on sweet work on WHO (or WAR as they refer to it nowadays). May you never know a NGE.
about 1 year ago
@Foxstab: I may be nigh half a year late, but better than never.
In that time, though — just a few days after the initial post, in fact — Mr. Rubenfield edited his words quite heavily. (I’m pretty sure this post initially had the “Eat a dick OM NOM NOM” line in it, directed at detractors.) The line you quote was added after the fact, for example, which Scott noted in the edit at the top of his post.
So, yeah, we did read his post before he changed it. You’re now seeing the edited version.
about 2 months ago
I have played since SWG since launch and thouroughly enjoyed it. But I am sorry, I do not believe it was any of the designers/programmers faults. They have no say in what is produced from a company they work for. Sure, they could have stood up and went against pushing the NGE, but they would either be fired, or it would still be pushed through, which more than likely happened. Also, go code an MMO for yourself and see how far you get with it…..
I for one thank the Dev for writing that article. We all knew that SOE and LA were mess ups to begin with, just odn’t buy/play their games anymore…