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‘Letter to the Editor’
 

The following was written and submitted to GameZone by a reader and gamer in Star Wars Galaxies. The opinions stated herein are his own.

 

 

A Player Describes Frustrations of His Travels in the Star Wars Galaxies MMP Universe

By Jobe

 

Premium places on fixing the game before it is too late to save it

 

"I am a Bounty Hunter.  I kill for profit, and I will use whatever tactics necessary to collect my bounty."

Does this sound like the life for you?  Then I dare you to become a Master Bounty Hunter in SOE's Star Wars Galaxies.  Now with the new Jedi Invasion eight months after launch, they are needed now more than ever before.  The Empire is cracking down and Uncle Vader wants you!.
 

I wanted nothing more than to become a bounty hunter since I first heard of the exciting and profitable lifestyle this offered me to experience.  I pre-paid for my copy two months before release, and I was online and ready to begin my journey the night of launch.  Unfortunately, SOE wasn't as ready as I was, and my adventure had to wait a couple days to actually begin.  The first few weeks after launch were frustrating and loaded with crashes, severe server lag, and a lot of minor bugs.  After a few dozen quick-fix patches, the game started running pretty smooth, and I was on my way to being a part of the online Star Wars universe.   

 

By the middle of August, I finally achieved Novice level in Bounty hunter.  I needed some extra help, so I decided to visit the forums and get some feedback and maybe a few tips and tricks.  I found what I needed and more, but I also found the community in there to be a tad on the bitter and angry side.  After reading about 50 or so threads on the boards, I realized that I was angry as well, it's funny how the forums have a way of doing that to you.  The chat boards are the places to find whatever you could possibly want to know about the game, and a lot you wish you never saw.  There are literally millions of posts and counting, if you can find what you’re looking for then you're golden, or if you're too lazy to search, just start a new thread with the same topic that's been posted 1000s of times already and throw a blind eye to recycling.

 

Around the end of September I reached a dead end in my journey to mastery.  The infamous "2-4-4-4" signature tag is all over the bounty hunter forum and the players wanted answers as to why.  Begun the ban war has!  People came out of nowhere and the post counts skyrocketed, all of them flaming the developers and asking for fixes to these bugs.  Sony instituted a "Player Correspondent System" around August for every profession to take in all the input, suggestions, and criticisms from the player base, turn it into a constructive presentation, and give it to the developers to help solve all the issues and bugs from severe to harmless. 

 

The players themselves could vote and help elect their representative.   Great idea, right?  We all thought so, and it definitely settled down the mobs that flamed the forums and those who called the CSRs on a daily basis crying for fixes, nerfs, and new content.  What's the pay for this opportunity to work with SOE?  Aggravation, threats and demands from players, "fanbois," and a look into the minds of the developers via private forums and one-on-one discussions with them.

 

Like every correspondent soon learns though, you can't please all of the people even some of the time, and our first player representative ended up quitting on us. Why pay some balding nerd guy to play the game everyday when you can find some poor sucker who'll do it for nothing?  Even though game bugs prevented us from mastering bounty hunter, there were a few powergamers who achieved the title of Master after about three months, so they said anyway, there was a way to change your profession title above your head in game to whatever you wanted, so no one really knows if anyone achieved this for sure.  It's just one of many on-going ways people can manipulate this game very easily.

 

October was, in my opinion, the beginning of the end for a lot of players from almost every profession for reasons stemming from lack of content, boredom, frustration, and game-breaking bugs and exploits.  The moderators had quite a time deleting thousands of posts and banning people left and right for whatever reasons they saw fit.  Why are all these people posting on the forums in droves of 1,000s instead of actually playing the game?  Most people couldn't play their characters for whatever reason, a lot were waiting for those shuttles for about 25% of their game-play time, and the rest were either trying to help, or destroy SOE's community moral.  Then, the developers were about to begin rewriting the laws of physics several times over and turn their game into an ever-changing marketing tool, which catered only to their inflated egos.  Do the developers actually 'play' the game?  Yes.  Do they seem to play favorites because of this?  It sure seems that way, but no profession is safe from the nerf bat.  Everyone wants to be the best, and SWG certainly gives every profession their 15 minutes, which must be why a Dancer can take down a Commando sometimes, or a group of Bounty hunters can get "pwned" (yep that's how they spell it) by a solo Tera Kasi Master/Rifleman who eats his spinach.

 

Player vs. player combat was nerfed, unnerfed, and nerfed back again, everything from weapon hit point damage to item decay rates changed back and forth several times, as if it wasn't even tested before implementation.  We, as the player base, started thinking, "what is wrong with this picture?  Do these guys even know what they're doing?"  Now being "stuck" in my climb to mastery wasn't bad enough, but PvP combat, the only thing besides boring quests and hoop jumping to do for fun, was now being robbed of any incentive we had to take a chance killing each other. Revamp nerfs to professions we dabbled in for the extra boost of power were always fun to experience, and the long wait for some hope to have fun would still reign. 

"Don't fret boys and girls, here's a' hint' to unlocking a Jedi character!  Find a Holocron, open it, and it will direct you to the path to open your Force sensitive slot.  We feel it's time to tease you guys some more, keep guessing and good luck with it."

 

Wow, thanks Mr. Dev, now I actually have something to do that could be fun.  By the way, why do I keep seeing this "camped" word everywhere?   Anyway, here's goes nothing, let's go look for these Holocrons, guys. 

 

After weeks of mental hibernation, the word is out... the new big publish is here!  Hooray!  Vehicles, creature mounts, player cities, some select profession fixes/nerfs, and best of all for me, the Bounty hunter missions are finally fixed and we can progress at our own pace to mastery without fear... and just in time for the Christmas shopping season too!  What a crazy coincidence... here comes the Jedi!  Must be time to do another interview for the press again.  Thanks for the blue print and the free Xmas Holocron to tease me into starting the journey to unlocking my Force sensitive slot and bestowing my own Jedi.  Cut to one week later - I am now a Master Bounty Hunter!  By the way SOE, why am I so poor?   Anyway, I wear my title with pride for it is the toughest mastery to reach in the entire game!  Well, it was before the dark times, before... the Jedi?  Why did they preach to us about keeping continuity when there are Jedi running around just before the battle of Hoth?  They will be rare you say? Permadeath?  Only 3 deaths then they start all over? Ok, that sounds fair, and kind of makes sense, I guess.  All we have to do is drop our professions and master 5 random professions to have a Jedi of our own!   Why would I want to get rid of my Master Bounty hunter now to grind out a Jedi?  I waited a long time for this, and I'm keeping it. 

 

The Holocrons you get will tell you 4 of the 5 you need to master, as the 5th Holo is silent, which gives you a statistical nightmare as there are 37 professions total, and you'd have to guess which of the 33 remaining you need.  It can take months to master just one of these, do the math on that.  Once you mastered a profession, it's stored on your character to avoid having to master it again for your FS slot, and the Holocrons compensate accordingly sometimes going silent after you open the 3rd or 4th.  If you're feeling too lazy for this, there are Jedi characters on eBay going for over $2,000 these days, but the devs told me these auctions get shut down all the time.  The Jedi method was a good theory, but they didn't seem to consider the distant future.  Soon after the word got out,  the best armor and weaponsmith shops started to close down, cantinas became filled with /afk Holotainers, the economy hit a Galactic recession, and so the "Hologrind" began.  Can you say m-a-c-r-o?

 

Now to keep in tradition, just weeks after the 1st of the Jedi started appearing, the development team once again decided to change their minds, even after clearly stating their vision for the Jedi to the press and game community.  Instead of keeping them rare to keep with the continuity, they change the permadeath rule of only three deaths allowed before losing all your acquired experience points, to only one skill box loss per # of deaths, and they plan a whole revamp in the near future to change the way you can become a Jedi, gearing it more towards long quests and the like.  These poor power-gamers, they are suffering from minor bugs, fear and paranoia on every planet, massive saber decay rates, not enough pearls and crystals to make new sabers, and are in need of some immediate attention. /Sarcasm off.

 

Could this open a can of worms that Sony won't be able to control after a certain point?  Will this game have to be renamed to KOTOR 2, or is this what they meant by "Revenge of the Jedi" in those old posters?   A Jedi gets a bounty on his head by using Force powers and/or his saber in view of others, as Jedi are suppose to be hunted by the Empire during this time period.  To top off the cherry on this sundae, we as bounty hunters, can't hunt our Jedi marks due to bugs.  Well we can, but we can't track them, not yet anyway.  That fix is scheduled for Publish #7, due out in the near future. Until that is fixed, we have to trip over them by accident, use a fairly large player guild, or pay a vast number of player informants as there are more than 10 planets to scour, each planet having more than enough places to hide.  All Jedi are considered rebels by default, but can travel on the path to the Darkside at a certain point, so it's not just the bounty hunters that can attack these Jedi but all overt imperials and rebels as well when the Jedi have a temporary enemy flag.  Bounty hunters are the only profession who gets paid for it though. 

 

Now Jedi are suppose to be stronger than any profession around the high Padawan level and up, and as of 2 months after the first one appeared, there are already Jedi Knights roaming around out there, and rumors of the first Jedi Guardians as well, these guys could cause even Yoda to break a sweat.  I recently did manage to find and kill a Jedi bounty after a month or so of hunting them.  He was with his bodyguards, as they all are due to their celebrity status, and he didn't even see it coming.  It was an awesome feeling taking him down!  His friends swore at me as they chased and shot at me for a good while, we had a few laughs, then had some cakes and pies from the recent Chef revamp.  It's really the diverse players' role-playing personalities that make the game interesting.

 

I won't even get into the Galactic Civil War's current issues and exploits, as there are too many to tell, it seems to be a real mess right now.  I don't participate in regular PvP battles like I use to, the raids on Anchorhead and Bestine are infamous, but my profession is outmatched, the majority of us that is, because we aren't combat warriors, we are bounty hunters.

 

In my humble opinion, I believe what Sony is doing wrong here, for the most part, is the lack of customer support and communication.  Every profession in the game has been whining about their respected lack of skills, repeating bugs still not fixed since launch, lack of good content, and the insertion of unnecessary new content before said bugs are fixed, i.e. - new hats and some vehicle decals.  It seems like the game was rushed into release way before it was ready, and the beta testers will say they warned Sony of this, but the public needed their fix, and we're still waiting for it.  At least we have new hats!

 

This year promises to bring a wide variety of MMO's to the player market, and for all it's worth, I know a lot of people who are just biding their time in SWG until the release of WoW, EQ2, City of Heros, and Middle-earth Online.  The coming publishes to SWG seems to be bringing combat system and more profession revamps, the "Droid Invasion" more new content and quest items/loot, and the very anticipated, new and improved Bounty Hunter vs. Jedi battles, now with working tracking droids. 

 

Could this be too little too late to save SOE's SWG from a mass exodus by year's end?  Players are returning every week only to find the old problems with their characters haven't been resolved yet, and a lot of us are just expecting more of the mandatory glitches and exploits that come from each update anyway.   All the free trial offers and exaggerated promises may not be enough to satisfy most of these Star Wars fans. 

 

What would I do to save this game?  It's Star Wars, it doesn't need saving anytime soon, but profits may fall hard soon.  If  SOE could just tone down the bureaucracy, the ego stroking, and blatant ignorance towards their paying customers, maybe they wouldn't have to silence and ban so many Star Wars fans from this game.  Some suggestions many of the players and I proposed, on the forums, were that SOE start communicating more to their customers, via the forums and/or emails, and not their usual comments on redecorating, self portrait posts, and mindless trivia.  This skeleton crew running the show idea doesn't seem to be working, so hire more programmers, designers, and CSRs to effectively deal with the broken aspects of this game in a 'timely' manner might be a good idea as well. 

 

One year after launch is not, by any means, a timely manner for a MMORPG on the high side of subscription costs that are out there.  At a rate of an estimated $4+ million per month in subscription sales, there should be funds available to make some major improvements. 

I love Star Wars, but I also have common sense, and even if a game is free, it doesn't mean it's necessarily fun to play.