Keeyai.com

For those of you who didn’t play SWG like I did you’ll need a bunch of background on the game, the CU, the NGE, and other ways sony thoroughly shat on the player base. The wikipedia article is fairly informative.

The SWG saga ASTOUNDS me. I have literally never seen or even imagined a more dual approach to anything. When I talk about SWG I like to use the term “almost amazing“. It SHOULD have been the best game ever. It was extremely novel, most of it was INCREDIBLE, and it was an awesome platform for the social side of MMOs, which is the reason people keep paying. This means it was developed by a great team, period. At the same time, however, it was completely destroyed over and over by TERRIBLE management and design decisions. How these two things are possible together, I have no idea. SWG literally survived multiple TRAVESTIES that would have destroyed a lesser game.

It wasn’t destroyed, but it WAS maimed, and couldn’t recover with the relentless onslaught by its merciless (and brainless) masters. I could rant about SWG for hours (and I have before), but this is just about this dev’s post. Go read the wiki, particularly the ‘Controversy’ section, marvel at the inanity, then read the rest of this.

Here is a rather whiny rant by one of the head devs on star wars galaxies. I’m linking this one instead of the ‘official’ one since he keeps editing the latter. It has been censored by the re-poster, not the author.

For those of you who hate text, I’ll quote and comment on some key points, although it doesn’t really bring the length down much.

Across the article, he is basically saying that the NGE fiasco was a corporate decision - he made the fighting and it was awesome, but says he warned that destroying the skills was a bad idea. He flip flops back and forth between telling everyone who complains to ‘eat a dick’ and apologizing. If I had to distill it into one paragraph, I’d go with this:

“Hi, I know we destroyed SWG over and over, but we were given bad orders from above. Our changes were perfect though; it was marketing and community management that ruined it. We don’t care about subscribers, only about the number of subscribers. Sorry for making mistakes, but I’m proud of them, and go eat a dick.”

He clearly thinks the NGE combat is vastly superior, which I lol at, even with how boring the regular combat was.

The difference was the control scheme, not the rules. You clicked, You shot.
When we demonstrated it, the first comment was ‘Wooooah.’
And the producer left the room.
He came back shortly and was torn. He knew that we had to make the change. It was THAT much better.
We did a side by side comparison. We tried to play the old system. We couldn’t.

He claims SWG had 200k subscriptions which was considered a failure for a star wars game and on top of that was ‘bleeding 10k accounts per month’. So they redid the entire game in 3 months and pushed the NGE, alienating and/or SCREWING the 200k people that stayed with the game despite all its long-standing bugs and balance issues (read about NGE + jedi).

So, we were given the directive to make Galaxies better.
Not just make Galaxies better, but make it succesful. Not the 200k subs it had, but really succesful. The idea was that we had the most valuable IP in the entire world, and we f*cked it up to the point of having 200k subs.
And yes, all 200k of you were important, but 200k means nothing in the scheme of things.

It should be noted that 200k subscribers = $36,000,000 a year. By August 05 they claim to have sold 1,000,000 copies. If Sony is netting $35 a box, that’s another $35,000,000. While you should have more numbers with the Star Wars name, at $3 million in a month, you should be able to fix all the long-standing bugs without destroying the system. And you should be able to do it FAST.

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 f*ckup.
But.
The f*ckup was NOT the changes.
Let me say it again, louder, for those who do not get it.
THE F*CKUP WAS NOT THE CHANGES.

Idiot. Guess what - marketing doesn’t maintain subscribers, it brings (or fails to bring) in new subscribers. If you make a change and you lose a huge number of subscribers, I’m going with the mistake being in the changes.

Right as I left SOE, post NGE..
Galaxies was subscriber positive.
A few thousand, but it was a far cry from the 10k per month we were losing.

After the mass exodus of subscribers, it would be hard NOT to go positive. When you lose 90% of the subscription pool, naturally your subscription-loss number should drop by about 90% as well.

You may enjoy this subscribers chart: NGE was Nov 05 — check that subscriber drop!

Um… I feel like he needs to make up his mind between ‘this game was shit’, ‘it wasnt my fault’, and ‘I rock at coding’.

A lot of you were upset. A lot of you still seem to be upset. I’m sorry if you feel betrayed, or that we ruined something you liked.
But I’m proud of the work I and the rest of the team did. I’m proud of the choices we made, the direction we took. ALL of SWG.

Before we launched, I wrote the combat system, mission system, spawning system.
I wrote the combat model for JTL, implemented Content development tools and ship interior systems and more.
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.

The design decisions and directions taken post-launch are probably the worst in mmo history IMO. SWG is the story of beating a live horse over and over until you finally get the dead one you wanted (which they are apparently still beating today).

This tickles me:

We were working in parallel, maintaining old code on the off chance that we would pull the plug on the implementation.

Everyone wanted the old swg back, but sony claimed the code was gone. None of us who have ever written anything believed them, but a full on admission now ices the proverbial cake.

As a bizzarro end to my post, this is how he begins his:

For those of you who want to misconstrue it, or perceive it as some ‘ZOMG YOU ROONED SWG’, please proceed to the back of the room where you can quietly eat a d*ck. OM NOM NOM.

Classy. Very classy. For the record, if I was a big game studio, I would never let this liability get his grubby hands on one of my games.

Can’t wait for the emulator.