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Posted: **2005-12-06 09:07pm**

Some blatant rumor-mongering from the G4TV forums. Rumor, yes, but it sounds pretty believable to me.

I don't expect you to take my word on this but I will share with you what I was told by a friend of
mine who works for SOE. I can't give you any more detail like his position, department, etc for
fear of him being identified. They apparently are bound by some air-tight non-disclosure
agreements.

Below is what I was told:

Apparently, the NGE has really, REALLY stirred things up in Austin. All sorts of fingers are being
pointed among SOE employee's as nobody wants to take the blame. Right now EVERYONE is trying to
distance themselves from being responsible for making ANY decsions on pushing the NGE live. Every
single employee is avoiding any connection to the NGE like the plague. I was told that the Dev's
expected SOME account cancelations when the NGE went live, but my insider said they were willing to
take those vet losses with the hopes of bringing in new subscribers over the holiday sales season.
Also, the devs were counting on most of the threats by vets to quit to not actually go thru with
cancelling. They have admitted, at least internally, that they number of cancels has FAR FAR FAR
exceeded the number they were willing to take. As a result, there is beginning to be some serious
discussion of a pre-NGE rollback. Several dev's are in serious jeopardy of being fired, and many
many many of the support staff etc are polishing up their resume's because SOE has become the
laughing stock of the online gaming community. No longer is it a badge of pride to work for SOE
according to what I was told. Even my friend says he is no longer proud of working for SOE because
of how they have destroyed their reputation.

Also, after having to report to LA on the NGE results, specifically the account cancels numbers,
some of the big dogs from LA have flown into Austin for some serious intervention. No details on
what that means yet, but it is known that Smedly and the senior crew at SOE have been behind closed
doors for unusually lengthy meetings and have emerged with scowls on their face. The speculation
is that LA is gearing up to crack down big time. (I would love to have been a fly on the wall in
those meetings)

Because of the signifacant loss of subscriptions, customer service has laid off 25% of their
support staff starting the 1st of January with more cuts expected.

All in all, the NGE turned out to rock the player base more deeply than what they expected. Talks
are now underway on cutting the game off sometime in the first quarter of 2006. There is
discussion with an outside company that is interested in purchasing the pre-NGE code with the aim
of running a handful (5 tops) of pre-NGE servers, and maintained with a skeleton support staff.
Right now this is apparently looking to be the most realistic result.

I will post more info as I hear stuff.

Added stuff:

Oh, and my insider said the Devs are being intentionally vague on their forum posting and player
communication because they want to keep as many subscribers as possible right now. A memo was
passed down to ALL Dev's by the SOE execs with a list of topics that are completely not to be
discussed or responded to on the forums. It is generally feared by the SOE team that the more info
the player base has, the more of them will quit the game.

Also, the game WAS in the pre-development phase on porting to consol (xbox, playstation), but that
those cycles have been 100% stalled at the moment because the future of SWG is so uncertain. But I
was told that if any Dev posted or said that consol talks were never taking place it is a lie
because significant discussions had already been underway with the design teams experienced with
porting PC games to consol systems and that the NGE was partly (not entirely) designed to acomplish
this objective

Posted: **2005-12-06 10:03pm**

How did it come to this? There are still frickin' Ultima Online players running around. It's hard to believe that an MMO could flicker out this quickly. On the other hand, given the seemingly inept handling of SWG (I've never played, but no one seems happy with it), it doesn't surprise me.

Posted: **2005-12-06 10:09pm**

I'm still pissed off with Target over buying this game before. Their price sticker was smack over the only part of the SWG box where it says "Online". At the time I didn't realize SWG was purely an online only game that required an account so I bought it thinking it would be fun. Fucking Target for putting the price sticker on the most important part of the box.

Anyway from what I've heard about the game, SOE has shit on it from day one. What they did with Jump to Lightspeed is a joke. They admitted to making stuff up claiming SW is so diverse and outright ignored what was already present that could be used.

Posted: **2005-12-06 11:09pm**

Master of Ossus wrote:

How did it come to this? There are still frickin' Ultima Online players running around. It's hard to believe that an MMO could flicker out this quickly. On the other hand, given the seemingly inept handling of SWG (I've never played, but no one seems happy with it), it doesn't surprise me.

Weird shit happens in the MMO industry. Asheron's Call and Ultima Online are still kicking, but the sequel to AC has already shuffled off into it's grave.

But really, SWG has to be one of the most spectacular failures in gaming history. How did a project combining an experienced MMO development team with the backing of Sony and LucasArts manage to turn into such a dismal clusterfuck? Someday after it shuts down, all the secrets will come out, and someone will write a book about it.

Posted: **2005-12-06 11:25pm**

It's called a combination of piss-poor game play, bad tech support, and not thought out well.

Vs say, Ultima Online, which has been running for years cause it's got a good story, smooth play, and decent support

Posted: **2005-12-07 12:17am**

As a currently-subscribed UO player, I can tell you that what little story remains has become a mishmash of whatever the last couple expansions were about, while support has never been it's strong point.

What it does have is gameplay that doesn't really exist anywhere else, with neither character classes nor experience levels. It also has a nice housing system, and miniscule system requirements. It's pretty much all there is if you don't want to play a game exactly like EQ/WoW.

Posted: **2005-12-07 02:33am**

All I know is that Eve online seems to have a lot of quitting SWG players joining in recently

interesting quote in that topic:

Someone I know worked in SWG Support for quite a while and some of the stuff he told me was mind-blowing...

Basically, the management in SOE were a bunch of arrogant, incompetent ********s who JUST DIDN'T CARE.

The Support team would list and collate the various issues and problems that needed to be resolved and present them to management, who would usually brush them off or dismiss them out of hand. The most commonly heard phrase was "you're not helping..."

In the end, around 2/3rds of the Support team was sacked and their jobs outsourced to India(no, I'm not making this up). The remainder were largely made up of sychophants and butt-kissers who told management what they wanted to hear...

Take it as you will

Posted: **2005-12-07 03:20am**

I'm actualy kinda surprised with that since EVE is a game that really requires you to invest a lot of time to get anywhere. Now, I never played SWG but from what I've been told they at least attempted to make it casual-player friendly while with EVE you see after a day that its not designed for casual players.

Posted: **2005-12-07 05:26am**

mmar wrote:I'm actualy kinda surprised with that since EVE is a game that really requires you to invest a lot of time to get anywhere. Now, I never played SWG but from what I've been told they at least attempted to make it casual-player friendly while with EVE you see after a day that its not designed for casual players.

Depends how you look at it. Yes, it is hardcore as you need to spend a lot of time in game to earn money, high learning curve and a really long term game.
On the other hand, the skill system is better for casual players who have little playtime (as they can keep training when they are offline rather than grinding experience)

Afaik, for a 2003 game, Eve is the only mmorpg that still keeps growing (new record with 18k simultanious players 2 days ago)

On topic: after reading more about the debacle in SWG, it's disgusting how SOE treated their costumers

Posted: **2005-12-07 08:00am**

"We're Sony! Fuck pants!"

Posted: **2005-12-07 08:19am**

Posted on the SWG forums already, with threats of bans to anyone linking to it. While I think the "Devs are being intentionally vague" bit is a bit close to tinfoil-hat land, I've got no doubts about the number of people leaving being very high. Damn near half my old server packed up and went to play Dark & Light, or the beta, or whatever.

Posted: **2005-12-07 09:29am**

Folks there is no validity to this post and it serves no purpose other than to start forum unrest. Reposts of this thread will be deleted. Anyone posting, bumping or linking to this will be removed from the forums.

Brenlo Bixiebopper
Director, Global Community Relations - SOE

Well I would not buy anything from those,

Yet one more reason to boycott Sony!

Posted: **2005-12-08 01:18am**

Do you all want to know why SWG failed? Simple, the Devs thought the following: "Star Wars, cash cow, no way this can fail, let's not put any effort into this." Plain and simple, apparently nobody realized that the good Star Wars games (Rogue Squadron, Knights of the Old Republic) are successful because of good story and gameplay.

Posted: **2005-12-08 01:25am**

I have no idea what the fuck any of this is about but this cracked me up:

Folks there is no validity to this post and it serves no purpose other than to start forum unrest. Reposts of this thread will be deleted. Anyone posting, bumping or linking to this will be removed from the forums.

Brenlo Bixiebopper
Director, Global Community Relations - SOE

THERE ARE NO AMERICANS IN BAGHDAD!

Posted: **2005-12-08 01:29am**

Alyeska wrote:I'm still pissed off with Target over buying this game before. Their price sticker was smack over the only part of the SWG box where it says "Online". At the time I didn't realize SWG was purely an online only game that required an account so I bought it thinking it would be fun. Fucking Target for putting the price sticker on the most important part of the box.

Anyway from what I've heard about the game, SOE has shit on it from day one. What they did with Jump to Lightspeed is a joke. They admitted to making stuff up claiming SW is so diverse and outright ignored what was already present that could be used.

Not to give you a hard time, but it seemed pretty much common knowledge that it was going to be an online only game. You also had access to the internet to read reviews and such.

Posted: **2005-12-08 01:49am**

I'm pretty much rooting for the death of SWG at this point. Really, it deserves it.

Posted: **2005-12-08 04:14pm**

LordShaithis wrote:I'm pretty much rooting for the death of SWG at this point. Really, it deserves it.

Indeed. The sooner this one is purged, the sooner LA will realize that there is still much money to be had in this field, and will make a new, hopefully better, game. So much potential, wasted...

Posted: **2005-12-08 05:22pm**

This sick dog of a game should have been put down some time ago

Posted: **2005-12-08 06:31pm**

Amen... let's hope they don't drag it out any longer then needed...

Posted: **2005-12-09 04:01am**

The problem with SWG was that it was dying well before the NGE. The Combat Upgrade failed to produce renewed interest or a significant number of new customers so something more drastic was needed. Truth be told, the NGE does have a lot of changes and features that the players have been asking for. Unfortunately, the NGE also removed many existing features and aspects that players enjoyed.

I have played a new character under the NGE, and the new content is enjoyable and has potential, but it is not the same game I have been playing for years. The NGE plays too much like a single player game and there really isn’t all that much to do outside of the main quests. They took out too much of the existing game and didn’t put a whole lot of new content back in, especially for veteran players.

And that’s the main problem with the NGE; it was launched too soon and in an incomplete state. Currently, the NGE only offers new content to level a new player to combat level 30 out of a possible 90 levels. This leaves all the veteran players, with level 80 characters (The pre-NGE level cap) with absolutely nothing to do.

The Devs have said that they are going to be adding more content in the near future, but many players are simply too frustrated, angry and unwilling to wait.

I don’t believe the game will be shut down in next few months, but they will be critical for the games long term survival. However, I do believe that more people have left then were expected; even on sparsely populated servers you notice the drop in active players.

SOE has no one to blame but them selves. The whole public relations aspect of the NGE has been disastrous, were talking George W Bush levels of incompetence here. They only gave us two weeks notice before the changes were made. They made the announcement the day after an expansion pack went live…too which they had to offer refunds. They did not provide enough detailed information about the NGE to allay veteran players concerns. Nor have they provided enough information about what they plan to add/change in the near future…

Many of the remaining veteran players that I know are only sticking around until either their accounts run out, or they see what the NGE is like when finished. The knowledge that the NGE is incomplete and improvements are coming is the only thing that sustains the undecided players who haven’t made up their mind yet… Other veterans are simply taking a break from the game; they say they will come back in a few months to see if the game has improved. I hope it will, but right now, it isn’t looking to good.

At the very least, they should have waited until the NGE was complete before going live.

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(Rumor) SWG: Dying?

(Rumor) SWG: Dying?