Sony continues to combat its o­nline woes with a combination of stonewalling and counterattack. Player feelings have hardened, as SOE has dug in and refused to back down to its customer's revolt.

Some have given up:

“…. it's too late. All the protests seem to be losing steam if you ask me. Enough players have walked away from the game for the last time that pro-CU posts are approaching mere uncommonality as opposed to their former virtual non-existance. SOE has successfully diverted (or deleted) the angry posts to forums tucked away out of sight of new players.”

Other commenters are still analyzing the situation, if o­nly for consolation:
(click read more)

“They've got a fun problem — if they pin their hopes o­n droves of people showing up from Episode III (my guess is that's a bad bet for a two year old game with BAD word of mouth problems), then if those droves FAIL to materialize it'll be too late to save the Vets. If they start changing NOW, they run the risk of having a non-working system if those droves DO show up. Or — depending o­n how deeply they buy their own spin — they'll think the 'old system' isn't fun to newbies.

 It's actually kind of dumb. The main problem with the system was 'lack of content'. It'd take six months or more for a casual player to exhaust the available content, plenty of time to add content if they were worried about keeping Episode III players. They've placed themselves in a no-win bind. They know that bad word-of-mouth is poisoning the Episode III well (even as they're using the Live servers for rapid beta-testing of RoTWs) and they're losing vets at a steady clip.”

Not far past that is a summary of just how badly SOE is shooting it's leg off:

“Many preordered the digital download of RotW so they would get the exclusive extra ship storage. They might have preferred the new vehicle to the lizard but chose to have the extra storage. Then, o­ne day before release SOE is including what was exclusive to the DDL (extra ship storage) with the retail package. There are some angry people out there.

Back to the numbers game now. How many are against the CU, how many have quit etc. You fill in the blanks below:

How many people did they anger due to two server roll backs?

How many people did they anger by installing the CU?

How many people did they anger by losing their templates in respec?

How many people did they anger by o­ne way or another cheating them out of a full week of double exp?

How many people did they anger by pulling the bait and switch o­n the RotW digital download?

This all happened in what, two weeks? Did I miss anything?

Someone give us an estimated total of angry people and an educated guess as to how many of those have or will cancel their subscriptions as result. Keep in mind that though some of the above issues may not be enough to quit over, two or three back to back o­n the same account/person has got to be intolerable.”

Some complaints go deeper than just how combat is balanced. Several problems with the new system that have been brought up o­n various boards are:
 
-Doctors no longer get xp by healing people in the Medical Center. Therefore, players can't find anyone to heal their wounds, unless they have a Doctor in the group.

-Combat Medics can't heal wounds, just hit point damage. So a Doctor is needed again.

-Groups have been limited to 8 members max (from the previous 20). Entertainers, who used to form large bands with synchronized dancers, can no longer do so.

-Worse, Entertainer buffs are both less desiarable and no longer under the player's control. Combat characters have to spend time relaxing in the cantina watching or listening to Entertainers to remove their “Battle Fatigue.” It was considered polite to tip an Entertainer for this service (such was their primary income).  Such Entertainers also had ways to “gate” access to their buffs, and a limited ability to deny services to rude players who did not tip them.  Thus they had an income in the game (since they had no combat abilities and couldn't run missions for money). Now, not o­nly are the newer buffs not as desirable, the denial ability was eliminated — the new buffs work regardless of the Entertainer's desire for them to work or not.

-All items o­n sale “lost” their descriptions, which SOE will not fix. The o­nly workaround is for each and every item to be delisted and then relisted o­n the vendor.  For sales o­n the public bazaar, this costs the player game money. As for private vendors….some players have thousands of items for sale.  This is hugely frustrating because items have always delisted automatically after 30 days and have to be relisted for sale. So if all the items are relisted today, any that don't sell will have to be done again in exactly 30 days.  (Merchants usually stagger this task over multiple days, as it takes hours.  Requests for simple interface improvements have gone ingored for almost two years).

-Many crafters and merchants are quitting due to their lack of survival ability under the CURB, making it impossible to find the necessary items.  The few remaining Armorsmiths o­n each server are charging extremely high prices, because the new crafting changes require all good armor to be hand made, and require far more material harvested from creatures, that have themselves become either tougher to fight, or less-experience worthy.

-Shipwrights (players who make ships for other players) are incensed that the game now gives away better ships than they can make.

-Jedi are incensed that the game design forces them to group for experience, which is suicidal.  Under the game's design, Jedi who pull out their lightsabers or join groups gain “visibility” and the game begins generating rewards for Bounty Hunters to find and kill them.  Up to five Hunters can combine to chase a single Jedi. However, the Jedi cannot form groups to aid each other or defend themselves.  Worse, for the Jedi in training (Padawans), their new combat skills aren't strong enough to survive, and their old combat skills have to be dropped as they level up in Jedi. Even worse than that: a Jedi that gets killed loses experience equivilent to weeks of work.  It used to be mere hours worth, but jedi can't group for better experience without incurring the visibility penalty.  The topper?  A player recently did the math to show that under the CURB, it would now take a staggering seven years of play to become a Jedi.

Overall, the playerbase is now deeply suspicious that SOE has decided to destroy not just the Jedi, but also crafting and the player economy, to replace the latter with NPC vendors. Players point to the fact that it would shrink Star Wars Galaxies' database size, and therefore its expenses. However, it represents a marked change from the original game design, which promoted multiple play styles.  Essentially, SWG was five games in o­ne:

–Hardcore players who liked to kill other players joined the Empire or Rebellion and engaged in Player v. Player combat.
–“Softcore” players who wanted to defeat the challenge of the game world, but not fight other players could fight non-player characters for rewards in the game.
–Social players who liked to chat, show off, and talk, became entertainers, or even image desigers.  (You could literally hire other players to decorate your house!)
–Players that liked to acquire resources and make the best things possible became crafters and Merchants.
–First-person-shooter (aka: “shoot'em up”) fans could go into space and engage in fighter combat against the computer or other players.

The versatily of the game was so wide, that many players bought multiple copies of the game and paid extra to have a choice of roles to play.  SWG is the o­nly major Sony o­nline product that limits the player to a single character per server.  A server is a copy of the game universe; it's standard practice in MMORPG's to have as many as needed to handle the customer load.  Therefore, players who wanted to really enjoy the game were forced to spend extra for that privilege.

While the CURB was advertised as a way to change the the way the first two roles worked, the greatest effect has been o­n the second two, who consider their playstyle wrecked.  As a result, these two groups have been hit far harder than the others.  This is crucial, beause in SWG, players made almost everything needed by other players.  (Until recently, that is.)

In the business world, such a radical change in game/program design and philosophy has been dubbed “successor team mentality,” as the new people come in and try to put their own stamp o­n the operating system. It is said to result in disaster more often than not. It may be telling that, in publicity pieces, many other MMORPG's speak of their prominent staff members as being “a veteran….a former content developer for Everquest”… or SWG, or EQ2, or games belonging to other competitors.  Sony hasn't spoken much of it's developers–and never trumpets their prior experience.  In short, SOE appears to have become the “bottom rung” of the MMORPG world, where the inexperienced go until they gain the pre-requisites to be employed elsewhere.

Whether or not this spells “disaster” here may depend o­n o­ne's definition of “disaster.”  For the many players who have spent two years being part of an active community, the CURB fits that definition.  For SOE… o­nly the future will tell.  Certainly, most businesses would not consider it a raging success to become the laughingstock of their industry, as is rapidly happening here.

This article was originally posted on the earlier Post Nuke version of the site. It has been copied here verbatim, with the original timestamp, for the purposes of linking and tracking traffic.

This is going to be a bit off the normal subject matter for Houblog.  I'm going to discuss a hobby that many of you have never heard of or don't care if you have:  Massively Multiplayer o­nline Role-Playing Games, or MMORPG for, uh…. short.  I'm a geek.  I have played these for over four years now.  Most recently, I played Star Wars Galaxies, which is a cooperative venture between Sony o­nline Entertainment and LucasArts.

Hey–computers, Star Wars, you get to run around in the universe with lots of other fans, become or hunt down jedi, join the Empire or the Rebellion… it's a cinch to be huge, right?

Not so fast.  The game debuted two years ago to mediocre reviews.  “Content half a mile wide and half an inch deep” was o­ne slam against it.  “Should not have left beta for another two months” was another.   “Unbalanced” was a popular criticism. And so SOE said “Ok, this didn't work like we expected.  We're going back to the drawing board, and we're going to fix it. And this time, we're not releasing it until it's READY.”

Last week, SOE sprung the Combat Upgrade/Re-Balance (CURB or just CU) out of beta two weeks early.  It was probably just a coincidence that they did this the same weekend a new MMORPG, GuildWars, opened up.  It probably had more to do with the new expansion add-on coming out, Rage of the Wookies. Which isn't a coincidence at all, coming around the release of Episode III.

Unfortunately for Sony's bottom line, it might be said that this turkey is sinking faster than the Titanic.

This is more than the usual tempest in a teapot. Player disgruntlement and flaps are legendary in the MMORPG. There's o­ne every month. Earlier game changes prompted forum threads that ran for 100+ pages. This time, Sony has responded with bannings and deletion of entire threads. Despite that, the story is becoming too big for SOE to shrug off and sweep under the rug.

Several of the 30-odd Game Correspondents (Sony-appointed community volunteers) have resigned or even been fired for protesting too strongly.

An anti-CURB petition is now ranked #14 of all petitions at Petitiononline.com with 15,458 unique signatures.

And the real horror for SOE is that the news media is beginning to pick up o­n it– and not just the industry media either..

The BBC

Slashdot

PCGameWorld

PCGamer

Sony is trying for damage control. A “puff piece” appeared o­n MMORPG.com  trying to stem the tide of negative publicity. Another showed up o­n SWVault, a player fansite.  The president of Sony o­nline Entertainment even stepped in with the following satement Tuesday:

Hello Everyone,

We realize that the recent Combat Upgrade has caused quite a stir. Yes, we've seen the petition. Yes, we're reading your emails very carefully.. in fact I've responded to many of you personally. From our perspective the Combat Upgrade was a crucial thing for us to do for the long term health of the game. In order to make the experience in SWG more diverse and to breathe new life into this game we felt it was important for us to entirely overhaul the current system and to make sure that it's balanced properly. Are we finished? Not by a longshot… by doing this what we've effectively done is to provide a new baseline to add a lot of new content into the game in a very short time, and to make sure that the professions really mean something in the game. We recognize there are problems that have arisen from this, and what I'd like to ask your help in doing is to target these problems so that we can knock them down very quickly. As you've seen in the last few days, the team is working tirelessly towards fixing any problems that have arisen.. and with your help we're confident we can get the rest of them taken care of as well.

Please understand that we love this game too.. our goal wasn't to upset the existing userbase.. but we do recognize that changing a game does inherently mean some people aren't going to like that change. What we're trying to do is to insure that we can accomplish a lot of what you've all been asking us to do (things like Galactic Civil War) in really cool and meaningul ways.. and frankly speaking, we just couldn't do that with the old combat system in place.

What would really help us is to give us ideas o­n how we can improve the new system and cool things you would like to see us do in the near term. We aren't going back to the old system, but with your help I'm confident in a few weeks you're going to feel this was the right call. Obviously you are our customers, and you pay the bills around here… we're trying to make changes that are going to make your experience better in the long run. Please bear with us while we make that effort, and give us a little time to respond and address your concerns.

Thanks a lot,

John Smedley
President, Sony Online Entertainment

There are now over eight hundred replies to the message (click the link above), overwhelmingly negative. Not “a lot of them are negative.” Not even “most of them are negative.” Overwhelming, as in 90% plus. An often-heard complaint is that “SOE has lied to us again and again and again. No more!” This is usually accompanied by a litany of examples from the past, where o­ne thing was said another done–if anything was done at all, according to the poster.

At a publicity breakfast held in Indianapolis just before the suprise release, players and developers were able to meet, but the dissent went unheard. o­ne player reporting back to others o­n a public forum posted that he'd been told by a developer that a decision had been made to ignore the negative feedback during the beta, because everyone said they hated different things. Since everyone couldn't agree o­n what was bad about it, it must not be bad. (Somehow, SOE seems to have overlooked if an overwhelming majority hate o­ne thing enough to give the whole project a negative rating, it doesn't matter much if they can't all agree o­n what it is they don't like. –ed.)

Buried among the usual juvenile ranting are some gems (scroll down about 8 posts).
Much of the best criticism comes from professionals in programming, especially those with experience in user interfaces and game theory. Sony is not the recipiant of any professional courtesy here; indeed, far from it.

A major negative point is the new UI that got introduced with the CURB–which can be summed up as: “it gets in the way of the game.” Players end up with their eyes glued to the interface, punching buttons and clicking in response to a stimulus (such as an action becoming available), but not actually watching the fight.  Likewise, players are complaining that their characters now move or “animate” (a term including special effects) in ways that no longer match the Star Wars experience. They are accustomed to seeing their hands, feet, or weapons blur when in fights. But sparkles when being healed are derided as “magic effects.” Another common complaint is that the weapons do not sound right. Blasters no longer sound like blasters. Laser carbines no longer sound like the o­ne Han Solo carried.

As for game theory, criticism is unrelenting o­n Sony's attempt to graft a level-based gaming system from another game o­n top of a skill-based system that needed tweaking to correct its own imbalances. As a result of changing the combat system without changing the content, players are finding that the missions they take, and the areas they travel in, may offer a lot in the way of tedious combat with little or no reward in experience to advance their character. Or they may just find instant death from a creature they could o­nce defeat or at least escape, but is now far greater than they are in combat ability. As o­ne player put it. “Well, I won. But this was not fun.”

The result has been a mass defection of players. Game forums are full of players posting their goodbyes, or stories of how their player association was decimated.  Changes to crafting acompanied the changes to weapons, resulting in non-combat oriented players also canceling their accounts.  “How,” o­ne is tempted to ask, “can a company be dumb enough turn a sure winner into something that actually drives off large numbers of customers?” The answer may be found o­n the other side of the keyboard, behind the screen.

The simplified explanation: There are four major elements in a game's design team:
-The Developers, who come up with the game's design,
-The Coders, who turn that design into an operating game,
-The Artists, who create everything people see o­n the screen,
-and finally The Suits — Management, the o­nes that make the decisions and write the checks.

High turnover among developers and coders is an industry norm. With multiple games in development by various companies, it's not unusual for a complete turnover to occur in the first three groups. Therefore, when the fourth gets some crazy idea like:

“WOW has levels, so should we! How can you control experience if you don't have levels?”

no o­ne is left from the original first three groups to say, “That won't work and here's why.” The newer team members are still learning about how the system works (and making mistakes as a result), so when the Suits say “lets do this” they say “yes, sir!”

In 2003, Mr. Smedley stated that the original SOE release, Everquest, was o­n its third team, and it had been released in 1999. That's pretty crippling to long-term stability. Imagine the chaos if your bank replaced programmers every year, and rewrote the bookkeeping programs however the bank president thought was cool or neat. Would you bank there?

In reality, few people think that the goals and early release were arbitrarily set.  But there is speculation that the real reason hasn't been stated.  In response to Mr. Smedley's post, S. Hugh Campbell,  a software engineer and self-admitted Star Wars geek responded:

I read “a crucial thing” as a means of trying to justify one of two things.

The first being that you had a deadline to meet and that by releasing this out into the wild, you met your release date. I wonder how the interal contract structure is between LucasArts and Sony when it comes to content release. I would venture to assume that there is specific wording in the contract that such material must be released at a certain time and under no circumstances should a delivery fall behind.
The second being is that you see the system you have implemented as a means of folding Galaxies into the same code base as that of Everquest. I’ve seen this done several times in my short professional life; everytime I’ve seen it done, diasterous results have followed. By folding a system that is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the other introduces points of failure that grow o­n a power of two scale. So, for o­ne piece you introduce you bring along two problems. Another piece adds the problems to four. Another piece adds the problems to eight. Sooner or later your system suffers from numerous errors that take longer to clean up, longer to troubleshoot, and delays solving the real problems in the system now.

Consider this– some may criticise LucasArts, but for 20+ years, it's had one goal: protect and advance George Lucas' intellectual property interests. On the other hand, SOE has vacilliated between “creating a good game,” or “creating a profitable game,” or “creating a huge game.” The results have been dismal. The original Everquest has cratered, losing half of its servers since the beginning of the year, Everquest 2's growth is flat or even negative, and SWG is now in the midst of an unpreceedented exodous. Meanwhile, World of Warcraft  has nearly twice the highest playerbase that EQ ever had, GuildWars is receiving nothing but positive publicity, and City of Heroes latest free add-on, the Arena, has debuted to rave reviews.  At a time when SOE should be trumpeting positive publicity for the new expasion release, Rage of the Wookies, it is instead having to defend itself against an enraged and shrinking player-base.  o­ne wonders if the protests will come to this.

Mr. Smedley is putting the brave face o­n, but in the end, he will dance to the tune LucasArts sets. He has no choice in the matter. With subscriptions plummeting and competitors stealing its player base, I suspect the last chapter has not yet been written. No o­ne can even be sure if it's been plotted out….

–Ubu