It's Pure Love between PC Gamer and SWG (NGE)

FoH's forums are dead once again, but before passing out someone linked the scans to PC Gamer's review of the latest changes in Star Wars Galaxies:

IT'S: Buggy - Desolate - Back to the drawing board

IT'S NOT: Got any depth - Fun - The way forward

27% - Disatrous
"Gives SWG more problem then ever"

And more:

"What a heap of junk"

"A failed attempt at resuscitating a dying game. Too many bugs and frustrating action."

"ABANDON SHIP: with a diminishing number of players, you may never group with others on a regular basis, thus missing out on the high quality adventures that exist out there somewhere."

"CRYING IN THE TERRAIN: Terrain plays a more integral role in combat now. You cannot attack through rock, which seems sensible enough. Infuriatingly, the reverse is not true. Mobs always appear to hit you even if they are hiding behind buildings or solid lumps of land."

"COMEDY COMBAT: A redesigned combat system with make-believe damage numbers makes it impossible to work out how much punishment you are inflicting. It's an attempt to move the game from stat-watching to faster-paced action. Sounds good in principle, fails in practice."

"CLASS WAR: Classes are only given an handful of combat skills throughout the entire game. This makes combat a dull and repetitive stream of default attacks, a special move than a swift heal. Repeat."

"Thirty-four professions were culled into nine 'iconic' classes. With no option to chop and change professions the classes are more nondescript than ever. Each of the combat classes are virtually identical, with no customization options to suit differing players' needs. Abilities granted every few levels are now merely replaced with higher ranked versions of the same ability when you level up."

"Jedi (the game's only real melee class) are at disadvantage and ranged classes fail altogether because it's impossible to keep a target singled-out when faced with more then two mobs that are close together."

"The crafting aspect of the game remains similar, but the demand for items has almost disappeared. The weapon you use no longer makes much difference: a level 16 DH-17 carabine will kill your target as fast as a level 80 Krayted T-21 rifle. The abolition of item decay limits Traders to one-time customers rather then the repeat sale economy of the past. Money will soon be just a figure with no actual value, driving crafters out of the game."

"There are no heroic characters in the tradition of the Star Wars universe, just your average Joes going through repeat missions on Mustafar, with nothing else to do."

"Welcome to a game that has lost its identity, where everybody is nobody."

"Nobody could have expected a total massacre of an two-and-a-half year old game in two weeks."

And more:

Influenced by: Star Wars, Benny Hill
Alternatively: World of Warcraft, 94%

OUCH!

Now to maintain a glimpse of balance in the Force I guess I'll have to link Darniaq's optimistical hopeful "review".

If that's the popular sentiment, I guess we have to reconsider the comments that followed the announcement of those changes. Back to discussing whether "change is good" or not.

The problems pointed out by PC Gamer are the same that I collected and listed just by reading the impressions of the players on various forums:
These changes don't seem to be for the better of the game. And, in particular, the implementation is terrible.

Which is exactly what I wrote in my comments as all this was announced:

My point of view is exactly the opposite. It's the context (completely changing a live service) to be useless and the content (the specifics of the changes) to be relevant.

It's only the quality of the implementation to matter here. If the quality is very high, the dissatisfaction would be easily reabsorbed. If the quality is poor, instead, you'll simply fail to get both new and old customers and the context would be branded as "not convenient" for future, generalized references and commonplaces formed out of thin air that will be very hard to discard.

It's really this simple.

What was important was to consider the resources available and figure out if there was enough "space" to do a very good work or not. SOE made its choice. We'll see the results. These results should be always considered for the specific game and the specific changes. Not generalized and standardized as absolute principles.

I don’t support “change” just for the sake of it, in the same way I do not support fancy ideas with no foundation. What I’d like to see is working actively to deliver what was planned and adjust what you are creating with what you learnt along the way.

The truth simply depends on how “change” is executed and not “whether change or not”. I hate this generalization about “change”. If *this* change is well executed the players will finally reward it, if it sucks the game will pay an harsh price. The same would apply if we were talking about a brand new product.

People are RAGING against the NGE but what I read in the complaints is about NPCs shooting through walls, melee being retarted, and huge problems with the controls. Yes, they are hating "change", but they are hating it because it's, once again, an half-assed, incomplete *implementation*. IMPLEMENTATION. And yes, this is the fucking problem of SWG since day 1. They dragged the game in every direction possible, finishing nothing.

I said it in the past and I'll repeat it. The HUGEST problem of SWG is the high churn rate of the developers. Starting from Raph. The game switched hands like the cheapest whore and its current status is NOWHERE SURPRISING. But there isn't anything to learn from here, if not that without commitment, long term and STABLE commitment, you go nowhere. This is why it's so important the managment in a company to keep things together.

On the same lines were the comments from TerraNova I quoted:

The problem is that SWG's chief problem from the beginning has been poor implementation, poor communication, poor service. Koster's design ideas went wrong when they got awkwardly stitched in late Beta to counterposing designs, when the center could not hold. They went wrong when they went live in a horribly unfinished state, with an underresourced live management team desperately trying to keep a very leaky ship afloat.

Unfortunately, the live management team seems to have ignored another long-standing criticism of SWG by many observers: that their design and implementation process is a disastrous mess. Never more so than with the NGE: whatever it is conceptually, in practice, it's roughly on par with an alpha build of a MMOG.

And more or less the same is what Darniaq observed:

"For the most sweeping change to ever hit an MMORPG, SOE effectively gave the players a few days of notice. They didn't seek opinions. They weren't testing it for months on the public Test Servers. They didn't have a long dialog with the players. They basically made the announcement, pushed the code to the Test Servers two days later, and as usual for them, regardless of what the players found on the Test Servers, the entire game was patched with it shortly thereafter."

"As such, they have received a lot of complaints. These criticism though, from game forums to traditional mass media to industry professionals, are less about the changes to the game and more about SOE's handling of it."

"This system is both completely different and nigh incomplete. The reason there's not much to say yet is because so much is left undone. Even true collision detection is not yet in, nor is it slated for another six months."

"That the players pay for how poorly they are all implemented can't mean we forget that they're being tried at all."

After these changes were announced I criticized three specific points:
1- How the transition was handled (communication with the players) (1, 2, 3)
2- Overall design (choices made nowhere solid or convincing) (1, 2)
3- Implementation (1, 2, 3, 4)

ALL three of these went terribly wrong as I feared. But the "change" itself wasn't an issue. If not in the equation: change = increasing risk.

What was important was to consider the resources available and figure out if there was enough "space" to do a very good work or not. SOE made its choice. We'll see the results. These results should be always considered for the specific game and the specific changes. Not generalized and standardized as absolute principles.

Then, sometimes, it's also possible to hear some positive comments:

Still having fun in SWG. Not only the first fun I've had since the game came out, but this will probably be the longest I've been subscribed. Despite any problems with the NGE. I didn't want to be a fucking moisture farmer, I wanted to be a badass Sith and crush Rebels under my heel. It's too bad crafting is getting shafted so hard, but the focus on crafting all this time shafted the entire game.