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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.