You know, it's sad when hardcore MMORPGers get disillusioned by this but I can't help but get some satisfaction from the knowledge that this could become the biggest MMO failure since Sims Online with Verant/SOE and LEC getting kicked squarely in the nuts.
"Men like sex, thus boobies! Oogaba!" - dejanzie
"If ads put your sanity to the test
come on down to Rat Boy's nest!
light up a stogie, and soon you'll see
how rock can be commercial-free!
I would be very surprised if Galaxies failed in any appreciable fashion. Note that, despite all this trouble, several of the 10 servers now available are regularly full at prime time.- Elysium
OMG, hahah, right now the launchpad chat room is has people complaining they can't create characters. Sal_the_Pal, one of the programers, came into the room and said that all the servers are up, but that the servers responsible for character creation had crashed and that new characters would not be able to be created until they got them back up....So all those people that just bought the game today can't even get into the game. It just keeps getting better...Eason
Mythic still holds the record for the best MMO launch, period. I picked it up day one, and was playing with no problems. No crashes, no show-stoppers. Thanks Mythic, even if I don't play Camelot any longer.SOE could learn quite a bit from them. That's for damn sure.
Just another great bug, straight from the CSRs mouth:CSRJohnR: The "Can't Delete Mission" is a known issue and should be resolved shortly, Unfortuantly that is all we can do right now, I'm very sorryEason
Wow! You should have seen how amped these two guys ahead of me in line at EB were. That were so excited to get there deluxe edition of SWG! I'll have to admit that I had a wry smile on my face and the word "suckers" did flash through my consciousness.Despite all that, I always hate to seem fellow game players get reamed. Especially since they never learn and nothing good for the future of the industry ever comes of it.Eason is right. The bay area has quite a few watchdog TV segments. I'm sure ABC 7 news would love to go interview some Lucas Arts reps in Marin and SOE reps in San Diego.The faction exploit reminds me of the combination of sparring in UO to become a GM in fighting in a few hours, with the fish cakes to healer exploit that would take you from dread lord to noble in 15 minutes. They never learn!
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
Nultal, not once did I state an expectation of a totally bug free experience. But the launch of games like Planetside and Dark Age of Camelot has shown gamers that there can be MMO game launches that don't need to be at the other end of the spectrum like Anarchy Online and Star Wars Galaxies. Just browse the forums of SWG and you will see that my experience with the game isn't isolated, it's the norm.As of this moment, the harvestor bug IS NOT fixed. While I can access harvestors near towns without have'n to relog, any harvestor that I have that is more than 2000m from a town will not alow me to access the operate screen without a relog. I figure that since I'm out in the boonies the servers do not have data cached and there is a failure of some sort to retrieve the information about my harvestor. A relog causes some sort of accurate retrieval of all geographical and item data around me and ONLY then am I able to operate my harvestors.There is still issues with grouping for missions and not getting proper xp when you complete missions. Small groups seem to be able to occasionally get the proper xp, but as soon as I have over 8 people in my faction destory missions, the xp stops coming in.Trade windows are completely flakey, you have to make sure you don't type or have any action occur while you are trying to trade, or the window will close on you. This is a real pain in the ass, cause I am usually out at a good resource vein running my /sample macro. My guildmates are the ones running to and from my location with resources so that I can grind up the Artisan/Architect skill trees, and my macro usually cause a trade to fail. Forget asking a question about an item in the trade window, cause typing will usually cause the window to close.Crafting windows are a real pain also. To quickly craft an item (I have to craft almost 900 weapon powerups to go from Engineering IV to Novice Architect) you use your enter key to accept stages of the crafting sesssion. But if you happen to be just a little too quick with hitting the enter key at certain points, it cause the whole session to error out and you lose your materials. Here is a warning to future architects: Take your time when crafting house deeds, cause of the huge number of resources it takes to build them, it is quite easy to cause the crafting session to error out and you lose all the resources.Just today, I experienced five disconnects from the game. I have two computers running side by side with two LCD monitors, and on one computer I play the game and on the other computer I keep the launchpad chat window open. As soon as I get a disconnect I watch the chat room, and sure enough, the number of people in the room jumps up by 30-50 people who just experienced the same disconnect.During gameplay down times in the game, I see what kind of questions people have in the chat room. This is the general chat room, not the troubleshooting chat room, but almost everyone in it is asking technical support questions instead of chatting about the game. If the game was at a playable stage I would expect that people would be in the general chat room asking questions like "how do I do this...." or "where do I go to ...." but that isn't the case.All of the guildmates that have joined me in SWG have the same opinion of the state of the current game, that we can't recommend to our other guildmate to join us. Maybe they can correct a lot of these issues in the next couple weeks, but if you were in the SWG beta, you know that the have a track record of patches that are 5 steps forward and 4 steps back. I wouldn't bet any amount of money that we will be better off two weeks from now.I have had an Internet connection and playing multiplayer games since before the first web page appeared on the internet (and still occasionaly play some MUDs), so you can hardly claim that I have my head in the sand when it comes to my knowledge of internet gaming. I have beta tested and played the live versions of the following: Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online (quit 3 months after launch, I find this SWG launch to be as frustrating as the AO launch), Dark Age of Camelot (best launch ever), Asheron's Call 2 (did not play live based upon beta experience), Planetside (beta only, I won't pay to play FPS when I have Battlefield 1942) and now Star Wars Galaxies.And like I stated at the beginning of my article, I am astounded by and admire the working parts of SWG. The visuals in this game are record setting for a MMORPG. The depth of the crafting aspect of the game is the best I have experienced in any MMORPG to date, and it is probably the reason I'll endure this buggy launch instead of jumping ship at the end of the free month.But what happened on Starsider's server tonight really shows just why the beta testers screamed that the game wasn't ready. On Tatooine, the town of Anchorhead is a rebel controlled town. Players started yelling that a large group of overt Imperials were on the way and everyone should prepare to defend. Over the ridge comes a group of over two dozen Imerials, not in the bone armor that most of the rebels are wearing (it's the only armor that crafters have advanced to at this stage), they are ALL wearing full suits of stormtrooper armor and they all have Imperial pets, clearly a large group of people that abused the faction bug exploit that I mentioned. The rebels that fought were either killed within minutes, or chased out of town.Sorry, but that kind of occurance for PVP in a game just days after launch is a CLEAR indication that they were premature in releasing the game this early, before they had known faction bugs fixed.Eason
First, I will apologize in advance to the staff here, but this is pure flame bait to me and I can't seem to turn away.Here is a clue my friend. He purchased a product at retail, now it does not work. Not just fails to meet expectation mind you (though certainly that as well) but DOES NOT WORK. Frankly it is god given right, and dare I even say responsibility, to complain long and loud to anyone and everyone who will listen. It is people like you with your, you should shut up and take, it attitude that perpetuate this pathetic sate of the industry. Why shouldn't we be given an every cascading spiral of ever worsening products if we buy them anyway and never speak up about their quality, or lack thereof . Yes... all software has bugs, how many and what severity impact the customer and how quickly they are fixed are a question of the quality of the process and the people at a company. With games though they are not just a piece of software, you are buying an entitlement to be entertained, and SWG by all accounts in not delivering to a significant number of their customers. Heaven forbid they should be upset about that and have the audacity to not sit their patiently not being entertained while their dollar to play ratio on the $50 dollar first month spirals ever downwards... yes by all means sit there and wait and only complain if major play stooping bugs still exits after it has been placed into the hands of thousands upon thousands of customers in a week or so.. yes that will certainly teach companies what sort of process people and customer relations to have, because it rewards them financially (massively, QA is one of the largest expenses) for... doing evil upon their (largely) unsuspecting customers. If I had purchased SWG I would be filing a complaint with the BBB and the AG (not these things ever help). As well as complaining just as loudly and as bitterly as everyone else now having there hopes and dreams of pleasant entertainment brutal smashed again and again.
-Griffon
Did Samurai Jack ever get back to the past?
I'd like to see screens of that too. This truly is a sequel to UO. That event makes it seem like SWG even has its own version of the dread lords controlling access to all the dungeons.
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
I didn't think to capture screenshots at the time, but since I hang out in Anchorhead a lot I'm sure they will be doing raids on the poor town again tonight. Even better than screencaps, I can capture video. If Certis can handle host'n the file, it will be about 8-15mb.Eason
Screencaps it is then.I shot a ton of video of the end of beta, I have some really cool shots. Like when everyone gathered at the memorial outside of Bestine on Tatooine. They have a flag up at the spot of where the very first 100 beta testers stepped foot on SWG soil. At the time, there were no structures, no mobs, no cities. Just sand as far as the eye could see. They just stood there and passed emotes between each other. Sad thing is, for some players, that is all they can do now almost two years later.But back to the footage, the end of beta party was held there at the memorial and I have some great footage. At one point, the spawn code in the area kicked in, detecting large numbers of large groups, it spawned hundreds of mobs nearby and soon is was total mayhem. It got to the point were my computer system couldn't handle the data it was trying to process, hundreds of mobs, over 50+ characters in the area fighting, hundreds of corpses of players and mobs. Poor video card crapped out and I crashed to the desktop. Several attempts to relog in didn't go well, as soon as it started to try to render it would kick me back to the desktop. Hours later I tried again and was finally able to get into the game, as corpses had decayed away.This doesn't bode well for large scale PvP battles, especially if the spawn code goes wacky again like it did in the last day of beta. In the middle of a PvP battle you are going to see the spawning of hundred of mobs in the area and people will die to players/mobs. Not because they were outnumbered, but cause of the lag and crashes to desktop.
you still have my email? oh actually i think its changed as the company i worked for went out of business. if you can email me the file, id love to see it.if youre registered in the forums, ill private message you my email.
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
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You know, it's sad when hardcore MMORPGers get disillusioned by this but I can't help but get some satisfaction from the knowledge that this could become the biggest MMO failure since Sims Online with Verant/SOE and LEC getting kicked squarely in the nuts.
"Men like sex, thus boobies! Oogaba!" - dejanzie
"If ads put your sanity to the test
come on down to Rat Boy's nest!
light up a stogie, and soon you'll see
how rock can be commercial-free!
'I'd hit it!'" - HP Lovesauce
I would be very surprised if Galaxies failed in any appreciable fashion. Note that, despite all this trouble, several of the 10 servers now available are regularly full at prime time.- Elysium
"I think Elysium has the right of it" - Certis
OMG, hahah, right now the launchpad chat room is has people complaining they can't create characters. Sal_the_Pal, one of the programers, came into the room and said that all the servers are up, but that the servers responsible for character creation had crashed and that new characters would not be able to be created until they got them back up....So all those people that just bought the game today can't even get into the game. It just keeps getting better...Eason
Mythic still holds the record for the best MMO launch, period. I picked it up day one, and was playing with no problems. No crashes, no show-stoppers. Thanks Mythic, even if I don't play Camelot any longer.SOE could learn quite a bit from them. That's for damn sure.
I agree wholeheartedly Syixxs. Mythic showed everyone how it could be done, and nobody listened.
"I think Elysium has the right of it" - Certis
Just another great bug, straight from the CSRs mouth:CSRJohnR: The "Can't Delete Mission" is a known issue and should be resolved shortly, Unfortuantly that is all we can do right now, I'm very sorryEason
Wow! You should have seen how amped these two guys ahead of me in line at EB were. That were so excited to get there deluxe edition of SWG! I'll have to admit that I had a wry smile on my face and the word "suckers" did flash through my consciousness.Despite all that, I always hate to seem fellow game players get reamed. Especially since they never learn and nothing good for the future of the industry ever comes of it.Eason is right. The bay area has quite a few watchdog TV segments. I'm sure ABC 7 news would love to go interview some Lucas Arts reps in Marin and SOE reps in San Diego.The faction exploit reminds me of the combination of sparring in UO to become a GM in fighting in a few hours, with the fish cakes to healer exploit that would take you from dread lord to noble in 15 minutes. They never learn!
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
Somehow, I don't see Michael Finney doing a "7 on Your Light-Side" segment.
"Men like sex, thus boobies! Oogaba!" - dejanzie
"If ads put your sanity to the test
come on down to Rat Boy's nest!
light up a stogie, and soon you'll see
how rock can be commercial-free!
'I'd hit it!'" - HP Lovesauce
A little hostile but nice counter-point Nultal.
Certis beat me to it. - Elysium
Nultal, not once did I state an expectation of a totally bug free experience. But the launch of games like Planetside and Dark Age of Camelot has shown gamers that there can be MMO game launches that don't need to be at the other end of the spectrum like Anarchy Online and Star Wars Galaxies. Just browse the forums of SWG and you will see that my experience with the game isn't isolated, it's the norm.As of this moment, the harvestor bug IS NOT fixed. While I can access harvestors near towns without have'n to relog, any harvestor that I have that is more than 2000m from a town will not alow me to access the operate screen without a relog. I figure that since I'm out in the boonies the servers do not have data cached and there is a failure of some sort to retrieve the information about my harvestor. A relog causes some sort of accurate retrieval of all geographical and item data around me and ONLY then am I able to operate my harvestors.There is still issues with grouping for missions and not getting proper xp when you complete missions. Small groups seem to be able to occasionally get the proper xp, but as soon as I have over 8 people in my faction destory missions, the xp stops coming in.Trade windows are completely flakey, you have to make sure you don't type or have any action occur while you are trying to trade, or the window will close on you. This is a real pain in the ass, cause I am usually out at a good resource vein running my /sample macro. My guildmates are the ones running to and from my location with resources so that I can grind up the Artisan/Architect skill trees, and my macro usually cause a trade to fail. Forget asking a question about an item in the trade window, cause typing will usually cause the window to close.Crafting windows are a real pain also. To quickly craft an item (I have to craft almost 900 weapon powerups to go from Engineering IV to Novice Architect) you use your enter key to accept stages of the crafting sesssion. But if you happen to be just a little too quick with hitting the enter key at certain points, it cause the whole session to error out and you lose your materials. Here is a warning to future architects: Take your time when crafting house deeds, cause of the huge number of resources it takes to build them, it is quite easy to cause the crafting session to error out and you lose all the resources.Just today, I experienced five disconnects from the game. I have two computers running side by side with two LCD monitors, and on one computer I play the game and on the other computer I keep the launchpad chat window open. As soon as I get a disconnect I watch the chat room, and sure enough, the number of people in the room jumps up by 30-50 people who just experienced the same disconnect.During gameplay down times in the game, I see what kind of questions people have in the chat room. This is the general chat room, not the troubleshooting chat room, but almost everyone in it is asking technical support questions instead of chatting about the game. If the game was at a playable stage I would expect that people would be in the general chat room asking questions like "how do I do this...." or "where do I go to ...." but that isn't the case.All of the guildmates that have joined me in SWG have the same opinion of the state of the current game, that we can't recommend to our other guildmate to join us. Maybe they can correct a lot of these issues in the next couple weeks, but if you were in the SWG beta, you know that the have a track record of patches that are 5 steps forward and 4 steps back. I wouldn't bet any amount of money that we will be better off two weeks from now.I have had an Internet connection and playing multiplayer games since before the first web page appeared on the internet (and still occasionaly play some MUDs), so you can hardly claim that I have my head in the sand when it comes to my knowledge of internet gaming. I have beta tested and played the live versions of the following: Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online (quit 3 months after launch, I find this SWG launch to be as frustrating as the AO launch), Dark Age of Camelot (best launch ever), Asheron's Call 2 (did not play live based upon beta experience), Planetside (beta only, I won't pay to play FPS when I have Battlefield 1942) and now Star Wars Galaxies.And like I stated at the beginning of my article, I am astounded by and admire the working parts of SWG. The visuals in this game are record setting for a MMORPG. The depth of the crafting aspect of the game is the best I have experienced in any MMORPG to date, and it is probably the reason I'll endure this buggy launch instead of jumping ship at the end of the free month.But what happened on Starsider's server tonight really shows just why the beta testers screamed that the game wasn't ready. On Tatooine, the town of Anchorhead is a rebel controlled town. Players started yelling that a large group of overt Imperials were on the way and everyone should prepare to defend. Over the ridge comes a group of over two dozen Imerials, not in the bone armor that most of the rebels are wearing (it's the only armor that crafters have advanced to at this stage), they are ALL wearing full suits of stormtrooper armor and they all have Imperial pets, clearly a large group of people that abused the faction bug exploit that I mentioned. The rebels that fought were either killed within minutes, or chased out of town.Sorry, but that kind of occurance for PVP in a game just days after launch is a CLEAR indication that they were premature in releasing the game this early, before they had known faction bugs fixed.Eason
First, I will apologize in advance to the staff here, but this is pure flame bait to me and I can't seem to turn away.Here is a clue my friend. He purchased a product at retail, now it does not work. Not just fails to meet expectation mind you (though certainly that as well) but DOES NOT WORK. Frankly it is god given right, and dare I even say responsibility, to complain long and loud to anyone and everyone who will listen. It is people like you with your, you should shut up and take, it attitude that perpetuate this pathetic sate of the industry. Why shouldn't we be given an every cascading spiral of ever worsening products if we buy them anyway and never speak up about their quality, or lack thereof . Yes... all software has bugs, how many and what severity impact the customer and how quickly they are fixed are a question of the quality of the process and the people at a company. With games though they are not just a piece of software, you are buying an entitlement to be entertained, and SWG by all accounts in not delivering to a significant number of their customers. Heaven forbid they should be upset about that and have the audacity to not sit their patiently not being entertained while their dollar to play ratio on the $50 dollar first month spirals ever downwards... yes by all means sit there and wait and only complain if major play stooping bugs still exits after it has been placed into the hands of thousands upon thousands of customers in a week or so.. yes that will certainly teach companies what sort of process people and customer relations to have, because it rewards them financially (massively, QA is one of the largest expenses) for... doing evil upon their (largely) unsuspecting customers. If I had purchased SWG I would be filing a complaint with the BBB and the AG (not these things ever help). As well as complaining just as loudly and as bitterly as everyone else now having there hopes and dreams of pleasant entertainment brutal smashed again and again.
-Griffon
Did Samurai Jack ever get back to the past?
Hey...are there any screenshots of that event on Tatooine? I'd like to see them if possible..
Aint nothing new about the world order..it's been playing since the day they put George Washington on a quarter
85's face the truth you're too dumb.
http://www.myspace.com/armyofthepharaohs
I'd like to see screens of that too. This truly is a sequel to UO. That event makes it seem like SWG even has its own version of the dread lords controlling access to all the dungeons.
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.
I didn't think to capture screenshots at the time, but since I hang out in Anchorhead a lot I'm sure they will be doing raids on the poor town again tonight. Even better than screencaps, I can capture video. If Certis can handle host'n the file, it will be about 8-15mb.Eason
If Certis can handle host'n the file, it will be about 8-15mb.Fraid' not, unless someone wants to send us a sack of cash for the bandwidth.
Certis beat me to it. - Elysium
Screencaps it is then.I shot a ton of video of the end of beta, I have some really cool shots. Like when everyone gathered at the memorial outside of Bestine on Tatooine. They have a flag up at the spot of where the very first 100 beta testers stepped foot on SWG soil. At the time, there were no structures, no mobs, no cities. Just sand as far as the eye could see. They just stood there and passed emotes between each other. Sad thing is, for some players, that is all they can do now almost two years later.But back to the footage, the end of beta party was held there at the memorial and I have some great footage. At one point, the spawn code in the area kicked in, detecting large numbers of large groups, it spawned hundreds of mobs nearby and soon is was total mayhem. It got to the point were my computer system couldn't handle the data it was trying to process, hundreds of mobs, over 50+ characters in the area fighting, hundreds of corpses of players and mobs. Poor video card crapped out and I crashed to the desktop. Several attempts to relog in didn't go well, as soon as it started to try to render it would kick me back to the desktop. Hours later I tried again and was finally able to get into the game, as corpses had decayed away.This doesn't bode well for large scale PvP battles, especially if the spawn code goes wacky again like it did in the last day of beta. In the middle of a PvP battle you are going to see the spawning of hundred of mobs in the area and people will die to players/mobs. Not because they were outnumbered, but cause of the lag and crashes to desktop.
you still have my email? oh actually i think its changed as the company i worked for went out of business. if you can email me the file, id love to see it.if youre registered in the forums, ill private message you my email.
Being fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster.