You've got to admire Smedly for what he did. He owned the biggest **** up in MMO history (NGE). By not renewing his license, he is no longer associated with his monumental failings, he's now looked at as the greatest Star Wars MMO visionary ever.

LOL true. Funny how things work out that way.

As some may know, I was once a hard core SWG player and still have fond memories of it, but I realized that kind of game (pre-NGE) could never work today. The grind, the wide open sandbox, no hand holding with quests, etc; no developer would touch it with a ten foot stick. You might be able to develop a sandbox MMO that goes under the radar and fills a niche somewhat successfully, but slap Star Wars on it and it explodes. Media attention, fan expectations... You're just setting yourself for failure if you did that. It's never going to happen.

Three good rules to follow:

 

1) Turn off general chat.

 

2) Learn to recognize the forum posters that have said for years (I can say that now, I've been back a couple) that every change is for sure the final nail in the coffin and will cause a majority of the player base to leave. When they make such a post, immediately stop what you doing and do 10 stomach crunches. You'll have abs of steel in no time! Alternatively, do what I do and take a sip from a fabulous martini.

 

3) Learn not to get peeved about the opinions others hold of a PC game.

 

Dasty

Dasty I love you <3

To reply to some:

1. I understand the game has it’s faults, even I can see them and acknowledge it, but that is not a reason for the game to die.

2. Someone stated I mentioned escapism three times, ever heard of emphasis? I’m sure I am not the only one who sees SWTOR as an escape and I wanted to press the importance of that.

3. To the post talking about people wanting another SW MMO, they’d have mentioned it by now and I don’t see it happening anywhere in the near future not as long as they can get money out of this. I have heard this mentioned as well.

2. Someone stated I mentioned escapism three times, ever heard of emphasis? I’m sure I am not the only one who sees SWTOR as an escape and I wanted to press the importance of that.

Long as it's not Bettlejuice, we're good.

Quite honestly, escapism, that is the best description of a Role-Playing game I have ever heard.

Let me fix that for you.

 

and somehow think that if it dies.. SWG2 will replace it.

As much as I would wish that SWG 2.0 would become a thing if SWTOR finally dies, I really doubt it would happen. In fact, and sadly, I think we would go literal years without a Star Wars mmo. There would be pseudo mmo style games during that time, but not a full on mmo. Finally after all of those years, there would finally be some renewed interest in making a Star Wars mmo again. And that would then take another 3-5 years of production to make happen. So if swtor takes a dive after the Anthem launch, then I predict a good 10 years before we would get something comparable.

Let me fix that for you.

 

and somehow think that if it dies.. SWG2 will replace it.

I never played SWG but find the SWG fans who continually go on about how much better SWG was than SWTOR, and how SWTOR would have been a hit if only it had been more like SWG, somewhat amusing.

SWG was a niche game that had a mixed reception at launch and only sold a few hundred thousand units during the first year of the game's existence, despite being a MMO set in the Star Wars universe. That isn't to say that people can't prefer SWG, but they shouldn't pretend it was more successful than SWTOR.

I never played SWG but find the SWG fans who continually go on about how much better SWG was than SWTOR, and how SWTOR would have been a hit if only it had been more like SWG, somewhat amusing.

 

SWG was a niche game that had a mixed reception at launch and only sold a few hundred thousand units during the first year of the game's existence, despite being a MMO set in the Star Wars universe. That isn't to say that people can't prefer SWG, but they shouldn't pretend it was more successful than SWTOR.

You can't really judge a few hundred thousand as failure during those mmo days. It was the pre-million sub wow era, and 200-300k was considered a decent success by many mmo standards of the day. Most of the gaming industry still considered MMO's of the time as a niche product. No one realized the sorts of profits that could be had from a mmo model.

With that being said, SWG did reach 500K subs at it's peak which was at the release of the JTL expansion 1 year after launch. From there it was a steady decline due to the devs being forced to start chasing the popularly growing WOW, rather than focusing on the game's strengths and drowning their players with new content. Instead the SOE suits forced the devs to make jedi easier to get, and then pressured them to clone wow over and over, which we all know how that turned out. Ironically, SWG at its end really wasn't a bad game. And it had a lot more to offer than many realized, but it got the shutdown orders after the announcement of SWTOR (people where genuinely hoping it was going to be a swg 2.0 style game).

What is sad, is that the game really was years ahead of its time with the features it offered. Many of which still aren't even attempted today. Ultimately, a perfect Star Wars mmo would be one that could fully encapsulate SWG and SWTOR into a single mmo, then you really would have a contender for the top MMO spot.

I never played SWG but find the SWG fans who continually go on about how much better SWG was than SWTOR, and how SWTOR would have been a hit if only it had been more like SWG, somewhat amusing.

 

SWG was a niche game that had a mixed reception at launch and only sold a few hundred thousand units during the first year of the game's existence, despite being a MMO set in the Star Wars universe. That isn't to say that people can't prefer SWG, but they shouldn't pretend it was more successful than SWTOR.

Likewise. I never played SWG but I do enjoy the tears of the ones you describe. There's one on this forum who's a particularly egregious example - I've never seen him say anything that wasn't hate - NOT constructive criticism - for this game or cult-like devotion to the memory of SWG.

You can't really judge a few hundred thousand as failure during those mmo days. It was the pre-million sub wow era, and 200-300k was considered a decent success by many mmo standards of the day. Most of the gaming industry still considered MMO's of the time as a niche product. No one realized the sorts of profits that could be had from a mmo model.

^^ I agree with this assessment. 300K active MMO subs back in the early 2000s, prior to WoW, was indeed considered very successful for an MMO.

With that being said, SWG did reach 500K subs at it's peak which was at the release of the JTL expansion 1 year after launch. From there it was a steady decline due to the devs being forced to start chasing the popularly growing WOW, rather than focusing on the game's strengths and drowning their players with new content.

Subscription data in those days was actually fairly easy to come by (as studios did not hide it back in the day) and for years we had a noble citizen on the internet that gathered, collated, and reported MMO population numbers for public discussion.

SWG actually peaked at ~300K active subs in 2003 and was fairly stable at that level until late 2004. Source: http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-2.png Still very respectable for the time, but not the 500K you assert.

What we do not know is how many total players played SWG over time. There might be some box sales data somewhere on the internet that would give this information, and it actually would be interesting to see it and compare it to the mmodata population tracking as it would give a fair indication of attrition rates over time back in 2003-2005.

I don't think anyone wants this game to die, its more like a disappointment that it will never be what it could have been.

I think that allot of people feel let down by Bioware /EA that this game could have been a Rival for WoW if managed properly and if money was put back into the game. Also the loss of the original creative geniuses that made this game was a huge set back for Bioware. It has never had the feel of the original Kotor and that has been a issue because that story was what drove this idea. I do cringe as to when EA determines this isnt making enough money for them and shuts it down like they did War Hammer.