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Player-Run Cities(Must -Read!)


Lord_Vessen

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There has been some new information reguarding Player-Run Cities, politicians, etc. It is being said that upon release we will not be able to build cities, and that a patch or something months later will be released enabling us to build Player-Run Cities. Many are wondering why Politician is no longer a proffession that will be there upon release, well there will be no point to a politician when you can not create your cities to rule over. Many PA's were planning on building cities to be their headquarters and will not be able to build until maybe 3-6 moths later. How will this issue affect general interest in the game?

 

I personally think that this was a bad move taking this aspect of the game out for a bit. This will also make it so many will save up money and supplies to build the city later on. So it might have been a good move, I just hope they will add this back on soon after game release.

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No vehicles either. Or at least until the space expansion.

 

But I don't really care, it'll be an update. It WILL NOT affect the game that much because EVERYONE is new, so once people figure out what to do, they will be able to run their cities when the patch comes out. Otherwise each city would be a reign of chaos because noone would know what to do 3 days after the game comes out. I think it was a good move.

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Well, I agree to the other posts. Building a city is expensive, and something we would have to save up for anyway.

 

Buuuuut, one damn good question:

 

If politician is removed because there'll be no player-made towns in the beginning....

 

Then why the heck is the Architect still there???

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Well my dear Setsuko, Architects will still be required for homes and businesses. Just because you can't create a player city, does not impede you from starting a business and wanting a more complex building design.

 

I think this is definetely a good move, though I have seen a lot of PAs based on nothing more than building a PA city. Should they not be able to do this.........well, let's just say I think that OUR (The Associates and Dark Sovereignty), might see an influx of new recruits. ;)

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That is what I have heard but I am not sure if it is true. But this is maybe a good move because imagine a PA building a city right away when they get the game, the city they will make might be run down, and most of the time the townspeople(PA members)

will be out and about questing. So I guess this was a good move taking out the aspect of building mass cities and adding it on later.

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Hm. Now I read the entire dev posts about this, and I see why they took it out. Can't believe I missed those long posts! That's the disadvantage of having the forum as a bookmark, and not the actual swgalaxies.net site! :D

 

 

And well, we can all be nomads until then, carrying our town with us, and settle for a new spot every night! Now, if the mounts where'nt postponed, we could really get this mongol horde going.... ;)

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Can't honestly see there being much left in this game that would actually make it worth buying any more. Check out this official forum posting. Details a batch of things that are being left out.

 

NO DARK JEDI ON RELEASE ?!?!?!? FFS! Yes, I know that it will take months of training to get your character to a sufficient level to even become an apprentice, etc, but at the end of the day, there's nothing to aspire to. I mean, come on, what is there to say or definite that they'll even put this $#1T in AT ALL ????? Just take a look at Everquest. Nuff sed.

 

NO VEHICLES? NO PLAYER TOWNS? So what exactly have they left in? :confused:

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Yes it is possible to build one.But the credits it will take to do so will be huge.The city will not be in competition will default cities in size.To make one as big it will take a ton of time and tons and tons of credits.You can open a mafia syndicate and own a city from the underground or be come a politicion.

 

 

For more info please refer to the main SWG website.

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If your main gripe with the postponement is the dark jedi, I laugh at you! HA! :D

 

Seriously, what seems to be in it on release is a solid mmorpg. Sure, vehicles would be nice, and player towns, but its nothing that I would expect from any other mmorpg, especially not upon release. "Boh-hoh, vehicles are ouuut!" So what?! Get over it! I bet you wouldn't afford one before the patch is out anyway. Same goes for Dark Jedi, what's the deal? You can still aspire to become one! By the time you're even close to the goal, the wait for a patch will propably not be that big.

 

I mean, as it looks now, its like AO, but in star wars. Now, that's not bad. And the prospect of it getting even better is still there. So I tell the bitching people to wait until they have even seen the game before they continue crying over the fact that they can't be Darth Maul upon release. Geez.

 

Oh, and that's number 1000! Woot! Thanks for a good time, everyone out there!

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No, my gripe about the game isn't just what I mentioned in that last post. As I said, I do realise that things like vehicles and player-run towns would be out of my financial and abilities' reach until long after the patch is released. Yeah, I'm annoyed about the lack of Dark Jedi, but still.... From what I've read so far in various pc magazines & websites, it's sounding progressively worse and worse. The amount of crucial stuff that makes up the core of the Star Wars Universeand is being left out now is senseless in even releaseing the game. I'd rather they pushed the release date back even a year, as long as they got the damn thing working the way it was intended to right at the start in the game design documents. I'd be really annoyed after all this time and hype to shell out £30 on a sub-standard, basic, "same-as-all-the-others" MMORPG....

 

Just finish the game before you release it please, guys?

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There's just one little thing that makes the whole "postpone the release instead!" argument worth zero, zip, nada:

 

We live in a capitalistic market. The producers wants one thing: pro-fit. A mmorpg is a huge project, which requires a large staff of cutting edge engineers. These costs mon-ey. Paying that money means less pro-fit.

 

So, the equation is something like this: every additional month that the game is not on the shelf is a month that generates 0 (zero) income, and a lot of paychecks. That is not profit.

 

However, if the game is released, then you have both the income from the actual buying of the game over the shelf, and the subscription fees. These can start to pay back the development cost, and makes the company afford to keep their team, and work on add-ons. If the game doesn't hit the shelves fast enough, it can even be cut entirely, since there's simply no way that revenues from selling the game can get back the costs of finishing it. So yes, if the developers decided for a 10 months postponement, chances are that there'd never be a SWG.

 

Because, my friend, a mmorpg is a huge economic risk. If you are lucky, the game will break even after 1-2 years. If it ever does. Breaking even means that the money from selling the boxes and the subscription fees is more than the money invested in the development, buying the servers, maintaining the servers, keeping the support team working, paying for the add-on designers etc. We are speaking about a multimillion investment, that takes a lot of time to pay back.

 

Yes, that's true: the producers will have to wait for a long time before they can even start to think the word "pro-fit". And 10 months of postponed release date is not just a punch at the community, it means ten months of paychecks to these cutting edge engineers who generates zero income. Now, it's not too hard to realize that that is not a situation the producers want, now is there?

 

Please, everyone: don't be blinded by your expectations of SWG, so that you fail rule #1: Look at the whole picture.

 

 

And yes, the whole picture ALWAYS involves economics. And cash is king.

 

Sorry if this post is patronizing. It's almost 2am, I have a fever, and I can't sleep. But I always get frustrated when people simplify matters such as these. Don't you kids learn anything in school anymore?

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Yes, that post did sound patronising. But hey, you're ill and tired, so fair enough.

 

But the simple fact still remains that if a company decides to go ahead with making an MMORPG, they know it's going to take a long time to make, and probably three times as long to perfect. They should have hte kind of financial backings to cover these overheads. They know that the project is huge, which will mean lots of staff, which will mean a small fortune in wages every month has to be paid out. And especally with something as popular as the Star Wars universe, which they know has a devoted following of fans, and a large percentage of them are what we like to call "hardcore fans", who do read into the EU, have watched (scrutinised) the movies so many times that to say that they were studying them would not be inaccurate. So the fans will notice all the screw-ups. They will notice the lack of certain towns on planets introduced in the EU, or planets in systems, or characters in towns. They will notice the lack of equipment, races, jobs, and hundreds of other physical items that should have been included, but have been omitted "due to time (or money) constraints". So making a game that will omit certain things that the fans are truly looking forward to seeing, interacting with, is possibly a stupid idea. Yes, it is true that they cannot posibly include every last item, town, vehicle, etc, from every EU novel, and they should have known that there would be a demand for this. Looking at it, I don't think that I would have taken this project on if I was the head of the development team. There's just far too much potential for mistakes, and too many things to include in the game.

 

You have to also consider the fact that if the game is shoddy or unfinished, the reviews will all be poor, public opinion of the game will be low, and consequently sales will be low. So they'll make a loss if they just churn it out with ends untied, loopholes unplugged, and items, objects and quests missing.

 

Looking at the bigger picture of the game, yes, it does sound interesting, but at the same time, there are so many constraints and so many omissions that it's just left me with an overwhelming feeling of disappointment. I just hope that the future improvements will add in the necessary things to make the game a little more.... well, Star Wars.

 

Oh, and yes, they did teach us stuff at school nowadays. So much so that I'm actually at University studying for a BA in Computer Games Design.

 

:p

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I think the main problem in the SWG community is that people's expectations of a MMORPG release is far, far away from reality. Let's take some examples:

 

EverQuest. When a friend of mine, Kristoffer, talked about this "new and totally innovating roleplaying game" many, many years ago, we were intrigued. When we finally saw it, and found out he paid MONEY to play it, we laughed our asses off. It might as well be called "block-Quest", the graphics were so poor you could hardly recognize anything, it looked like something one of us had done on a lunch brake in pascal. And the content? Nothing that immense, I'll tell you. Now, many years after, it's still not fun, but it is prettier, and a lot more detailed when it comes to content.

 

Dark Ages of Camelot. Well... we complain that there'll be no PA towns upon release. Upon the release of DAoC, we tried to make a guild. And we tried to make a guild. And we tried again. Everything bugged out, we got stuck in walls, the classes were totally unbalanced, and everytime we made a guild our guild chat merged with several other guilds. Later that year, after many patches, it earned most of the "MMORPG of the year" awards.

 

Anarchy Online. Do I need to mention this? Mostly unplayable the first six months, I now have several friends in my neighbourhood who count this as their favourite MMORPG. Why? Many, many patches later, it's a solid sci-fi MMORPG.

 

So why do people think that SWG will be any different? No MMORPG is complete upon release. That's the idea: the game evolves while you play it, even after three years of playing it, it will evolve, and grow, and take mysterious turns. To demand from the devs to deliver a complete MMORPG is absurd, the development time would take perhaps 2-3 more years. You want to play SWG now, or in 2006? The question is as simple as that. Myself, I rather play the game now and see it evolve over time, than wait for several more years.

 

Oh, and sorry if I am not intimidated by your games design studies, none of my friends who studies anything at LTH (the computer and technology part of our university) has any at all contacts with the world I call reality ;)

 

Point of post: MMORPGs are not complete upon retail. And they'll never be. And it's a good thing. Get used to it.

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Rive, the game is not shoddy, the game is full of great content and the game already has great reviews!

 

And the fact that you're bashing a game that is gonna be loved by most and hated by very few just means you and those very few are too hard to please no matter what they did.

Sure you will say, Well if they put in the vehicles, The Cities and Dark Jedi I be happy..I think you would find another reason to complain that they forgot this or that.

 

And don't say I don't hate the game cause they way you are going on about it..it sounds like you can't stand the game.

 

They can't make eveyone happy all the time but they are doing their best and that will just have to be good enough for you and the few unhappy souls.

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/agree Corpocus

 

For those of you who are short sighted on the efforts of the dev team (and who have never worked on any real world software project) I hope you chose to not play the game and continue bash it on the boards (or even within the game), because this detracts from the rest of the satisfied players experience. I for one am exstatic to see them remove features from the game to reach thier release date. As a QA manager for software development I see too often the antithesis of this. When a company decides to keep all the features, and development slips (which it will continue to do for eternity because it is the nature of the beast) then testing suffers, bugs are not caught, bugs are not fixed, and the resulting product is substandard and receives horrible reviews. See AO through their first year. Everyone knows that one bad review is equal to 100 good reviews. So I applaud their efforts to reduce the content to get that good review.

 

No matter what, this game will have a cutting edge engine, a skill based advancement, the SW universe, hundreds of possible career paths, a rich environment, and ultimately a superb MMORPG. Which will be followed by even more upgrades (Player Cities, Vehicles, Dark Jedi, etc) that will make it even more popular.

 

If you think you can find the financial backing to have a near unlimited development cycle that will allow you to continually slip to ensure all features make the released product, then more power to you! Otherwise, be thankful that we are mere months away from a great experience!

 

MadMardigan

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I'm just a n00b here, so my opinion probably doesn't count for much. But it seems like Rive's (and the others I've seen who are dissatisfied with the game) complaints are based on a lack of features in this game that pretty much no other game has.

 

Player-Run Cities? A prime example. What other game at any point promised to let players build their own cities, govern it, make treaties and militia for it, and generally own a substantial piece of real estate in-game? More to the point, what game's developers have said that they are confident it will only take a couple of weeks to do once they get around to doing it? (I take this from what i read in the latest newsletter; sorry if I'm extrapolating too much from what the devs said.)

 

Dark Jedi? What other game even has Light Jedi? Or something to that effect that takes months and months of hard work in order to become essentially a god among men? Jedi will be amazingly powerful and amazingly unbalanced, but the devs decided to include them EVEN THOUGH the time period isn't condusive to any new jedi emerging. That seems to me to be enough to make players happy. Plus, there's the fact that no one's gonna be a jedi for very long before they get around to making the Dark Jedi available, so it won't matter in the long run.

 

And complaining about the lack of species is just unfair. Anarchy Online has what, four different species? That's still a great game. And it's not as if the NPC's you run into will all be Humans, Mon Cals, Twi-leks or one of the other five playable species. No, the devs have said straight out that you'll encounter many, many different aliens throughout your travels. They've also said (I think) that they will be adding more species with later updates.

 

And especally with something as popular as the Star Wars universe, which they know has a devoted following of fans, and a large percentage of them are what we like to call "hardcore fans", who do read into the EU, have watched (scrutinised) the movies so many times that to say that they were studying them would not be inaccurate. So the fans will notice all the screw-ups. They will notice the lack of certain towns on planets introduced in the EU, or planets in systems, or characters in towns. They will notice the lack of equipment, races, jobs, and hundreds of other physical items that should have been included, but have been omitted "due to time (or money) constraints". So making a game that will omit certain things that the fans are truly looking forward to seeing, interacting with, is possibly a stupid idea.

 

Well, I AM one of those hardcore fans, or so my friends tell me. And having looked at the variety of features and inclusions listed as being in this game and weighed that against my prior expectations, I find that this game, if it delivers what the devs have posted so far, will be excellent for anyone, casual and hardcore fan and just plain MMORPG player alike.

 

But like I said, I'm a n00b here. Perhaps I'm not seeing the big picture.

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