<Disclaimer>
First of all, to my regular blog readers (all 5 of you!):  This post is regarding my decision to stop playing Starwars Galaxies.  Some of it will not be germane to anything you care about.  However, my intent is to point out the good and bad of my gameplay experience with SWG from the perspective of a gamer and a software developer, and hopefully this post is useful in that regard to a more general audience.
</Disclaimer>

Well folks, it's time for Logan-V and Thorin to sign off for good.  I've been neglecting the game lately, primarily because of work and Halo 2, but also because it's bringing me no joy anymore, and the annoyances are mounting.  Anyone who knows me knows that I am annoyed easily, and stay that way for some time.

So first, to get the goodbyes and whatnot out of the way.  Goodbye.  It's been a pleasure gaming with and getting to know each and every one of you.  It's the community of Naritus that has kept me here in the first place, in general, and specifically, my guild the Silent Alliance (SA).  So to SA, a big /salute to those that are left.  Krase, sorry to be bailing.  You guys (and girl) are the absolute best.  Additionally, to my forum friends, a big /salute and /thank.  To the bounty hunters, especially Hcaz, Oriz, Yyrkoon, Pigbrane, Euwou, Scheedo, Duff, Pigbrane (RIP), Fuh, and the rest, I loved bounty hunting with and against you all.  To the BHG, especially Matchstick and Cebot, thank you.  The BHG provided immense fun content for the players that SOE would simply not provide for us.  I feel like I should have been paying my 15 bucks a month to you guys.  Thank you for running the BHG, and thank you for allowing me to be a part of the management team.  I'm sorry to be leaving you as well, but I just don't have the time, and I've been slacking in my duties.

On to business, Thorin is active for another month, and while it pains me to pay one more red cent to SOE, I have to reactivate Logan-V and settle up my BHG affairs primarily.  I have a balance of BHG money that I need to tip over to Cebot, and I have a bounty on my head that someone needs to collect, because I will likely not be back.  I'm not ruling out a return if the Combat Balance ever happens, but it's unlikely.  So you may see me online here and there, but not for extended periods.  My contact information is all on this blog on the right hand side, as well as my XBox Live gamertag (LoganV).  Please feel free to use it.

To that extent, I would like to offer my experiences with Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and SWG, my ideas on how things could have been better done, and other such things that I know I can't post on the forums.

User Experience

The game itself, to be fair, is very well done.  The graphics are beyond impressive.  The sounds, taken straight from the Star Wars movies, add to the SW feel.  Having never been a reader of the Starwars books, I didn't know much aside from what I've seen in the movies.  But watching the original trilogy now, I can notice details I've never noticed before (hey, that guy has a DL44 Pistol) and whatnot.  As a casual Starwars fan, I've been happy with the look and feel of the game.  Your options are highly customizeable, and the user has a sick amount of control over his visual and auditory experience. 

Additionally, the character interactions are some of the best I have seen.  The inter-player chat and email communications, aside from some minor bugs with the email system, are top-notch.  There is a ridiculoulsy long list of player emotes, allowing you to interact with body language, as well as player moods.  These things are highly important in a MMO, because it's about playing with other people, not just killing stuff.  Without the player community and the ability to interact with the community, you have no MMO.

There is an extensive in-game command and macro system.  This is important.  Many players need the ability to daisy-chain commands automatically.  For a Bounty Hunter, or other combat professions, the ability to switch weapons, fire combinations of specials, take combinations of food and spice, all while in the heat of battle, is of the utmost importance.  For crafters, the ability to automate mundane tasks so you can concentrate on the finer points of your trade is of the utmost importance.  That does not mean the macro system is without its faults.  It has allowed people to "cheat" in a way.  There are macros to kill meatlumps while you are afk, loot them, and go at it for hours.  While you watch a movie.  There are macros to look at your friend's vendor over and over so he gets his merchant experience faster.  I say "cheat" because it's circumventing the way the game was meant to be played.  I don't mean cheat as in illegal.  I have used both of these macros and others because of the grind, which I will discuss later.  If certain things were different about the game, then the "cheater" macros are unneccesary.

Experience, Skills, and "The Grind"

This game has taken the stance that many RPGs take, which is you get xp for the stuff you do.  This is unlike say, a Diablo II type system, where you get general xp and can apply it anywhere you desire.  In SWG, if you want to weild pistols, then start killing things with pistols to get pistol xp and get better at using pistols.  This is the way a skill tree should be done, and it makes sense.

The skill tree consists of 250 available Skill Points, for you to spend as you choose.  There are novice profession lines of "Medic", "Brawler", "Marksman", "Scout", "Entertainer" and "Artisan".  From these base professions, you can work your way up certain trees of the profession to get to the elite professions:  Bounty Hunter, Pistoleer, Rifleman, Carbineer, Smuggler, Commando, Teras Kasi Artist, Heavy Swordsman, Fencer, Pikeman, Doctor, Combat Medic, Ranger, Creature Handler, Bio Engineer, Musician, Image Designer, Dancer, Droid Engineer, Architect, Weaponsmith, Chef, Tailor, Armorsmith.  For a more comprehensive look at the SWG skill tree, go here.  In short, the number of professions and skills available to a player is very extensive.

However, the method by which you gain these skills and professions is extremely poor, in this gamer's opinion.  In ever skill-based game, there is a grind.  The grind is defined as gaining xp to get new skills.  You obviously have to work for your skills, but the onus is on the game developer to balance the difficulty with the rewards.  The grind in SWG is best described as tedious.  At this point in the game, there is no fun way to gain new skills.  If you are a combat profession, you have to kill stuff over and over to gain that xp.  But until you are a higher level, you can't participate in fully 70% of the killable content, nor can you effectively PvP.  This is the reason people set up the recursive "meatlump macros" I mentioned earlier.  There is very little in the form of questing to be done, especially at a lower level.  And it is nigh impossible to enjoy any of the "dungeon" content until you are at least partially done with an elite combat profession.  The same is true of the crafting professions.  In the early stages of the game, when everyone was a n00b, you could make a living crafting and selling lower-level items while you gained your experience.  Now, however, it is impossible for a new crafter to make a living from his goods.  So his only choice is to craft nonstop for hours or even days to achieve a master level crafting profession and have something worth selling.  It seems as if SOE has forseen this and even promotes it.  When crafting, you can craft items in "Practice Mode".  Practice mode creates the item, but immediately destroys it so it doesn't take up inventory room.  Furthermore, practice mode actually gives a crafting experience bonus.  These two facts about practice mode makes it hard to believe that the developers did not intend for people to "grind" crafting.

Grinding low level skills is not fun, and it is not content.  It is a treadmill.  Nobody likes a treadmill, and it adds nothing to the game.

Moreover, the skill accrual system penalizes players who want to be able to try new things.  There is a hard xp cap for every type of experience.  Once you have reached this cap, you can gain no more experience in that skill.  Now if you have mastered that profession and intend to keep it, this is not an issue.  However, many people like to play a profession a while, drop it, and try something new.  So for instance, if you are a master Heavy Swordsman, and decide that you want to take a break from combat and be a crafter, you probably have about 900K of two-handed sword experience under your belt, unused.  Because of the way skill points are used, as you progress up the crafting tree of your choice, you will likely end up dropping some of your swordsman skills to free up points.  This is fine.  You shouldn't have unlimited skill points.  But, if you only drop partially out of swordsman, and happen to kill something with your sword one day, you are going to lose the amount of xp difference between that 900K and the cap for your current swordsman level.  It's gone.  You no longer have that experience.

In the grand scheme of things, if you wanted to drop crafting later and re-learn swordsman, you are back to grinding, because you have lost that xp.  The problem is that many gamers tend to think of RPG type games in terms of "real life".  Meaning, you say to yourself "in real life, if I have been a master swordsman, just because I put down my sword for a while to make swords instead doesn't mean that I've forgotten everything."  Basically, you shouldn't have to re-grind.  Re-learn?  Yes.  Re-grind?  no.  Not all the way anyway.  That discourages people from trying new things.  And discouraging people from exploring different avenues of your game leads to the death of your game.

The skill and xp system, in my opinion, is almost game-breakingly flawed in this regard.

Professions and Problems Thereof

Along the lines of the last part, there are problems with the professions.  There are professions that have been "broken" since launch.  This includes Smuggler and Bounty Hunter.  Others are problematic as well.  Some have been fixed up along the way, some haven't.  I will discuss this in broad terms, but talk about Smuggler and Bounty Hunter specifically as I have played both professions.

Many people, if not most, came into this game with an identity in mind.  Not unlike kids playing baseball and saying "I'm Jose Canseco and you're Roger Clemens" type of thing.  A lot of the people that ended up playing Bounty Hunter came into the game wanting to be Boba Fett.  Or, if they're the younger generation fan, Jango.  For smugglers, it's Han Solo.  The problem is, playing these professions is nothing like being these characters, and a lot of people are very frustrated by that.

Smugglers have almost no content, and no purpose.  They get faction perks cheaper because of their ability to be a "fast talker".  They have some special pistol attacks in the "dirty fighting" tree that pistoleers don't get.  And they can make drugs (spice).  They don't, however, do any smuggling.  Smugglers are a glorified crafting profession that gets a little pistol love.

Bounty hunters are probably the most maligned profession in the game.  Bounty hunters are faced with broken or redundant specials, limited weapon expertise choice, no "gadgets" or "toys" that the bounty hunters in the movies employed, broken marks and missions, and a severe, I mean severe, imbalance against the Jedi, whom they are supposedly there to "control".  Whereas in the movies and books the better bounty hunters were able to take on even high level jedi at times, in this game, a mid-level jedi can "pwn" most bounty hunters with ease.  And a single bounty hunter has no chance alone against a full-fledged Jedi Knight, balcony scene on Geonosis be damned.  This alone has caused a severe rift in the player base, and huge animosity between Jedi player and BH players, to the point where it's almost actual hatred.  This is not the fault of the people playing so much as it is the game causing such extreme frustration for two major groups of players, and pitting them against one another in the game.

Furthermore, every profession in the game has something wrong with it.  Useless special attacks.  Useless craftable items.  Useless skills.  The inability to use your profession for more than an afk macro buffbot.  The list goes on.  There is not a single group of players that is completely happy with their professions.  Mostly the players find ways to work around the problems, or try to ignore them.

Taking more time to fully flesh out professions, and balance the pros and cons, would have been a good idea.  As it is, only about half of the professions have anything really to do with Star Wars.  Rather, it seems like SOE has taken the standard RPG professions and tried to StarWarsify them.  Druid?  That will be a creature handler.  All RPGs have melee professions, so let's put in 5 of them and make them nigh-invincible.  Melee?  How many characters in the movies ran around with a giant hammer killing everything in sight?

Player vs Player (PvP) Content and the Galactic Civil War (GCW)

A good portion of online gamers look for PvP content.  It's present everywhere.  When the game AI (PvE) is lacking in challenge, what better test of your skill and adrenaline rush can you get than to try your hand against another actual player?

SWG has PvP.  You can duel individuals in a one-on-one test of your skills, or you can participate in the GCW.  Essentially, you choose one of three playable factions:  Rebel, Imperial, Neutral.  If you are factioned (not neutral), you can declare your faction affiliation and go "overt", meaning that your faction affiliation is open for all to see.  If you are not declared (covert) then you appear as a neutral.  When overt, you can freely fight overt members of the opposing faction.  Rebels vs. Imperials.  The Galactic Civil War.

PvP and the GCW are so broken that I can't even begin to cover it all.  First of all, there's the Temporary Enemy Flag, or TEF system, which is the cause of so much frustration.  Basically the TEF is something you get when you do something against another faction when not overt.  This includes things like running missions for the Rebellion and killing NPC Imperials as a covert Rebel.  You will get a TEF for 5 minutes, which means that any overt Player Imperials that happen to see you can attack you.  They get first strike.  Additionally you cannot enter buildings while you have this TEF.  However, there is another twist to the TEF system, one that is severely detrimental to the GCW.  That is the Group TEF.  Essentially if you are a covert, grouped with an overt, and the overt does something to an opposing overt, you get a TEF and can now attack.  This leads to TEF wars, where a single overt Rebel (for instance) will attack a group of overt Imperials.  The Imperials have only one targetable player, everyone else looks neutral.  All of a sudden, however, it turns out the overt Rebel was grouped with 10 covert Rebels, and they are now exploiting their TEF to their advantage.  Some call it strategy, but the general consensus of the player base is that TEFing in this manner is bad cricket.  This unbalances PvP and makes the factional war less fun.

Also to the detriment of PvP is the unbalanced professions.  Certain professions can "stack" skills, defense mods, and damage types to become nigh-unstoppable.  Melee professions have the upper-hand in almost all PvP scenarios due to an inordinate amount of natural defensive mods and toughness.  Not only that, but a speed-capped swordsman with a high-end Power Hammer has a ridiculous damage output per second, and is almost unstoppable by single players, small groups, and anything in the PvE part of the game.  I have seen two "defense stacking" melee players fight each other for over 20 minutes straight and neither come close to killing the other. 

SOE has promised a "combat balance" where the professions and their combat abilities are balanced against each other, but that promise has been made for a year now and it is still not in sight.  The lack of "combat balance" has caused many account cancellations.

Player vs Environment (PvE) Content and the Loot System

PvE is also highly broken.  Due to some of the issues with the "combat unbalance", certain types of characters can go kill anything in the game, by themselves.  All you have to do is be a Master Swordsman/Master Doctor and you too can kill everything in the game by yourself.

This leads to many problems, including economic issues.  Economy is highly important in an MMO, and part of the economy is high-end loot and money.

Until recently, you could, with the right professions, make over a million "credits" in under 3 hours running missions.  This sort of easy money leads to inflation.

Additionally, due to the fact that certain character templates are able to "solo" anything in the game, these characters end up with all of the high-end loot that is used to either sell, or make "uber" items.  These "uber" items further imbalance the PvP and PvE game, causing further frustration.  Moreover, certain looted items can only come from one place, or one creature.  The creature or items spawn at known intervals in known places throughout the day, which leads to the dreaded loot camping.  Loot camping takes content away from other players.  Loot camping ruins the economy.  Loot camping is rampant in SWG.  So rampant that people have been known to log in at the exact time for something to spawn, at the spawn point, kill the thing, grab the loot, and log off until the next spawn time.  This is ridiculous.

Seemingly Arbitrary Decisions and Seemingly Minor Bugs, Resource Allocation, Patches and Releases

Yet another issue is the seemingly arbitrary decision process to put new things in game.  Here is where I look at this from a developer's standpoint.  You can't change the functionality without talking to the users.  You don't change things that are working for no good reason.  A few cases in point:  Smugglers.  Smugglers one day were no longer able to use items that were in crates to do their jobs.  Keeping the items in crates made it less of a hassle to put all your tools in your limited inventory.  Smugglers "slice" armor and weapons to make them more effective.  To do this they need precision laser knives, molecular clamps, and upgrade kits.  Previously, you could carry those tools in crates and use them as needed.  One day, SOE decided that was unacceptable and changed it so that you had to remove all those tools from the crates before you could use them.  This angered many smugglers, and made one smuggler I know drop his profession.  Why?  Because it was arbitrary.  There was no reason ever given, nor could anyone think of a good reason, that made it make sense to hinder an already broken profession's ability to do one of the few things he could do in the game.

Another case:  One day SOE decided that you could no longer call stored items (e.g. vehicles or pets) from anywhere.  You had to be in a city or campsite.  Since these items are already on your person in the form of a "datapad", it made no sense to limit this functionality that had always been there.  Several months later, SOE changed it back, and you can once again call your data items from anywhere as long as you aren't in combat.

Meanwhile, the players don't see this as only being annoying arbitrary "nerfs".  They see this as improper resource allocation and task prioritization on the part of SOE.  Whole portions of the game are broken, and SOE is spending time breaking functionality that the players have come to expect to be there.

Other resource allocation issues are doing things like:  making it so you can store items on a bookshelf in your house.  That was in the patch notes recently.  Store items on the shelf in your house.  Was anyone clamoring for this?  Meanwhile, BH droids remained broken, the combat system remained broken.  No corporate software developer in his right mind would do things like this!  And if there were a reason, he certainly wouldn't leave the users in the dark about why things were done the way they were done.  He would be fired.  But SOE does this sort of thing on a weekly basis.

Regarding new content, SOE seems to like to put the cart before the horse.  Rather than fix the ground game, they rushed the space expansion to market, and told us that we would have to wait upwards of another 6 months for the fixes that had been promised to us.  Result?  A metric assload of account cancellations.  I would honestly be very surprised if there was an actual net subscription gain because of the space expansion.  First, there was a rash of cancellations from existing customers.  Second, a good majority of the people that got the expansion already played the ground game, therefore there is no extra subscription.  Finally, to convince someone to get the expansion, they have to get the ground game, the new subscription, and the space expansion at the same time.  The cost factor here seems to be a huge barrier for new accounts.

Nobody, and I repeat nobody, was clamoring for the space expansion.  It sounded cool, and people were excited about it, but that's when they were told it would come after the ground game was fixed.  When we learned that the ground game fixes were going to be secondary to the JTL release, and when we heard early beta reports that JTL was less than impressive, the hype was effectively dead.

And who is the genius that thought it was a good idea anyway to release the space expansion (JTL) within a two week timespan of some of the most anticipated games ever?  Things surrounding the JTL release:  Doom 3.  GTA San Andreas.  Halo 2.  Half-Life 2.  EverQuest 2.  Did they think they could compete?  Did they even think they could compete with themselves (SOE also does EQ2)?  Whomever made the release decision on JTL should be so fired that he's re-hired and fired again.  Meanwhile, they lost a ton of subscribers over it, people that were waiting on the game they have stuck with so long to be fixed and finally came to the conclusion that it wasn't happening anytime soon.  All in all, I think the JTL release and the decisions surrounding it were the worst gaming moves in the industry this year.

Jedi - The Hot Topic

My opinion:  Jedi broke the game.  If they had never put on the box that you could be a Jedi, there wouldn't be half the problems we have.  But they did. 

In the beginning, the path to Jedi was unknown, and the folks at SOE said that Jedi would be extremely rare.  We got a couple on our server, a handful really of everyone playing.  People were in a state of excitement...nobody knew how to do it.  During this time, people played the game, explored new areas, tried new things, trying to see if they could also unlock that Jedi slot.

Then, SOE decided that the Jedi population was growing too slowly.  Now remember, the stated timeline for this game is sometime between A New Hope, and The Empire Strikes Back.  Essentially, there is one Jedi in the galaxy, two Sith, and one Padawan.  There should, if you are a purist, be absolutely no playable Jedi in the game.  But most were willing to accept a few.  But SOE wanted more, so they invented "holocrons", which essentially told you that you had to master certain professions to achieve your Jedi.  This created the "hologrind" that killed the game.  Grind as many professions as you can as fast as you can to try to get a Jedi.  People were unlocking left and right, and now Jedi are probably 20% of the population.  Meanwhile, nobody was playing the game anymore, everyone was just grinding as fast as they could to the Jedi.  This is when the GCW totally died.  This is when the economy went south.  This is when a lot of people started to hate the Jedi.

Finally, SOE changed the hologrind system to a quest and xp based system, but the damage had been done.  It became clear through a series of publishes and patches that SOE was 99% concerned with the Jedi population and "fuck off" everyone else.

Community

The final straw for me, since I barely play anymore, was the heavy-handedness with which SOE is running the community forums.  This is why this post is on my blog, and not there.  SOE is going through a rash of post deletions, being total reactionaries, if anyone so much as says one negative thing about the game.  It's serious hard-core censorship.  Now it's their forums, and they can do as they please.  I understand that.   But when they start deleting posts where prominent players are saying goodbye to their new friends and leaving the game, that's the break-point.  Memo to SOE: delete this you fucktards.

I could go on much longer about the problems with the game, but suffice it to say that SOE has made enough mistakes to effectively kill what could have been a great MMORPG.  And they know it.  And you know what?  The other MMO companies are watching and learning.  Blizzard has specifically addressed many issues that come straight from playing SWG in their new MMO, World of Warcraft.  Many SWG players are leaving for WoW come next week.  I will likely not be among them, as I have had my fill of MMO for now.  The thing is, the community draws you into the game, makes you attached, and then the game ultimately lets you down.  That is what has happened to me.

So goodbye again to my friends on Naritus, and SOE, if you should come across this, try to learn something.

Now playing: Sum 41 - 02 - Nothing On My Back