Star Wars Galaxies:

A Player base Divided

Star Wars Galaxies was originally designed to be a “simulated world.” The whole goal with the game was to give you the environment and tools to form your own universe and then let the players develop as it was.

Thus there were no classes, 32 professions, with 17 skills per profession... 544 possible skills, Before Jedi... Those skills could be mixed and matched along their trees with enough points that any player could master as many as 3 or 4 professions. The Combinations and variety was endless.

Combine with that, dynamic player crafted equipment; EVERYTHING worth having in the game was player-made, with Stats that varied based on the quality of components and ultimately raw materials used. (Raw materials had dynamic stats that were random per "vein" as well)

The result was an amazingly dynamic game that had limitless possibilities as to any player and their equipment.

Think of that, people would play hours to figure out the best business strategies for their enterprise. Player Corporations would form with conglomerates of player-business men all working together to corner markets. Combat was varied and diverse at first, so many templates, and so many combinations available.

What went wrong?

It was the wrong soil to plant that dream. People expected Star Wars. They didn't go in planning to make a living as a Tailor who also shot a blaster... They went in expecting to be Han Solo...

Because the concept was based around Player interaction with players using the tools provided. Precious little content existed. No quests, no Adventures, just some generic Missions and a Few Dungeons etc... It wasn't what people expected and therefore they thought it unfinished and disappointing.

Then, People started to play the SYSTEM rather than the game. People learned that a Template of Skills XYZ was the "best" for combat. Within weeks HUNDREDS of players had cookie cut their own identical template. If LA/SOE Nerfed that template, the next flavor of the month would be adopted in a week or so.

Cowboy Capitalism Economics swept in. People would "offensively block" Good resource spawns to deny raw materials to competitors by building structures blocking access.

Lack of forward planning left no theoretical maximum to the quality of some items. Armor was being sold that made any/all PVE content too easy. And because of those conglomerates people would suck up such HUGE quantities of those really good raw materials that such high quality stuff was the NORM rather than the rare reward for good mining.

All this sent players drifting away. Bit by bit for 2 years they tried to chance down these phantoms rather than give the content that the players sought. SOE/LA was loosing subscriptions.

In a valiant attempt to get a handle on all this they patched away the Super uber stuff, and brought numerical values to the player's overall effectiveness. Now templates added up to "Combat Levels" and a CL80 of Template A was theoretically equal to a CL80 of Template B.

In short, they tried to simplify the problem. But what do you think happened when people's uber equipment was nerfed to average, and people's hybrid templates were suddenly HALF as effective?

The Players hated it... Numbers drifted away again. Those who remained had learned to Game the system and just pounded out the grueling process of becoming a Jedi and thus an "Alpha" Player, More powerful than most other classes.

So, we had nerfed players and a widespread imbalance that rewarded power-gamers over casuals and RP'ers more than any other game to date. With an Alpha class that was growing daily (at the end 47% of players were the "rare and powerful" Jedi)

Then the NGE hit.

All those endless possibilities? GONE.

9 professions all had the same skills and the same abilities and were balanced against each other in a lab. No more Alpha Class, No more variety... No more Flavor of the month problems and... In an effort to encourage people to take part in the content that WAS now being added to the game... Quest looted weapons and armor was now better than player crafted stuff.

So what’s wrong?

It was 2.5 years too late.

By this time, people wanting a typical MMO from SWG had tried the game, disliked it and left. Those who did re-taste found it to be far too under developed for a 2.5 year old game. (The NGE may have been passable if it was a "launch day system") So everyone the NGE WOULD have appeased was already gone. No "New Game Buzz" existed to bring in a bunch of Fresh meat and LEC/SOE had just gutted most of the reasons their existing player base had for continuing to play the game!

Guilds died over night and common gathering-places were left vacant.

All that stayed was Star Wars loyalists who saw SWG as the only game in town, and Pilots whose game had not been touched by the new system.

Now, SOE/LEC is stuck in a very bad place. Because expansions were developed and released based on the new systems and significant time has passed. They cannot simply "roll back" to the older system due to the effort it would take to re-migrate all the numbers.

The New subscriptions they expected from the "Free Trial" didn't pan out. Perhaps this could have worked better if they had used hot-linked web based advertisement rather then spend their budget on poorly placed commercials on G4. One would point to EVE, you cannot go to a game related site without seeing an add for EVE and it works. I have played their trial 3x already.

The player base is almost unanimous in disdain for the new system. Now they are adding in components a piece at a time that used to be in the game, time spent that could have been spent on content.

I would say that the current state of the game is not very healthy. The massive worlds feel empty of players; the promising systems are still unfinished or on the way and the public image of the game is not very positive. In short, the game needs Publishes and Players.

So, where is the future of this game?

Is it in a shutdown? To this date SOE has never ended the life of any of the games it supports, though some aggravated former players want the game shut down to “let a different developer make a Star Wars MMO.

Rollback? SOE representatives have stated over and over again, very adamantly that they would not roll back the NGE even if it was technically possible. Company policies change, and with the progress recently made on an SWG Emulator that uses the old system to run private non-SOE servers, it may be possible to play the older systems in some form in the future.

Improvement? This would be the path that SOE seems focused on. If the improvements planned and listed on SOE’s official forums come fast enough, and improve the public image of the game. If SOE adjusts its advertising strategy to draw in more people to try their 10-day sample, the game may just last.

Discuss it in our forums.

Written by M Karabinos on August 06th, 2006