Commando Archive

1) D&D. The original "Badboy" of gaming. The pen and paper game where you and your friends match wits against another friend who plays "God" and gives you content, character, a storyline, character progression, riches, and somtimes women. The plus side is that you have a constant outflow of new content... the bad side? If for some reason you get "nerfed" you can always reach across the table and throttle your DM friend.

2) MUDs. The first installment of interactive gaming over a phone line. My personal choice was the notorious Infinity which then spawned into my addiction to KNIFE. The plus of these games was that it functioned almost as a glorified "Chat room", except with swords. The monotony of wading through hours of the same content and "spawn timers" made the game VERY predictable. I knew that I had 25 minutes to kill 15 other things before the Demon lord respawned in his room never noticing that in fact he'd died only 25 minutes earlier. Of all the games I'll list, I miss MUDs the most. The content was purely based on people who weren't getting paid to take care of their overzealous D&D games... and to boot, if you bought the "God" of your particular MUD a keg of some sort, you usually ended up with a nice piece of equipment.

3) FPS. First Person Shooter. This genre of game came out and it revolutionized the way that things were viewed. You actually got to "see" another person sitting at the keyboard. The interactiveness of the game gave you a whole new feel to the regular versions of "Quake" and "Halflife". When you shot somebody with your rocketlauncher and they were plastered all over the screen, you got the humble satisfaction of knowing that the person sitting at the other end thought "**edit**. Nice one." The dimensions were endless and when game addons like "Team Fortress" started to arise you saw a nice cross of Player-made maps along with the "Corporation"'s franchising merchandise.

4) Ultima Online. I think this was the first interactive gaming environment over a phone line that also was visual (non-Zork text based). I never actually played this one, but the way that I hear it, things just weren't the same after people started hacking into accounts and the "Corporations" started taking over the industry. It was no longer fueled by students and coders, but instead by people who wanted to "make a buck".

5) EVERQUEST. The mother of all games. Everything that every D&Der has ever wished to see, and everything that every MMROPG since has strived to match. It started out SO perfect, but as the game progressed changes that seemed "necessary" to be made were overlooked, and the inception of the phrase "NERF" took hold. I still maintain my EQ accounts (all 3 of them) because I still love the game. But what I cannot stand is the lack of good Customer Service. In the 4-5 years of playing I've had my share of bugs, petitions and especially "NERFS"... I once read a very apt sentence about EQ:

"EverQuest is like smoking... every patch gets you closer to quitting".

6) SWG. The newest installment from Sony. Currently I've got 2 accounts for this BETA... oh wait, it's not BETA? Wait, I'm actually paying for this nonsense? I'm begging you... please stop this rediculousness right away. Don't go down the same road that you did with EQ, and stop the insanity of your track record! You've got SUCH a great game possibility here and quite frankly, you're screwing it up. Here's an example of why I don't think that we should be paying $49 for the game plus an additional $15per month.

1) DAILY patches at 7AM (EST). None of which is ever explained.
2) Weekly NERFS of game-wide scenarios. You're starting to fall back into the same pattern as you had with EQ, that of what looks to be ZERO testing and a desire to simply put out the game because it gives you money. Take some freaking pride in your work.
3) Zero "end-game" content that is any different than newbie content. This one is actually pretty big because you will eventually start losing people. Personally, if there isn't a change that happens soon, I'm either going back to EQ full time... or playing SWG until WOW comes out and pleading for a place in BETA so that I can get away from the Sony CORPORATION.
4) ABSOLUTELY no Customer Service in-game. /who all GM? Oh yeah, that doesn't exist. So I send in a ticket, and for 3 weeks it sat in my inbox when I logged in saying that it hadn't been looked at yet... only to suddenly dissapear completely without a single notice.
5) Weekly NERFS of player-classes. I don't really need to go into this one except to say that it's different than the game-wide NERFS because while trying to "tweak" a class, you ALWAYS end up "borking" it somehow. I haven't played this game for the longest of time, but weekly I see another cause that makes me wonder why I'm giving you $15 to screw me. Perhaps I should get a pimp? (Ack, sorry... trying to keep this post civil).

Frankly, in the end so many of these games are blending together (and forgive me if I've skipped a few games here and there, I'm just trying to make a point). What makes SWG different? Absolutely nothing. Seriously. Nothing makes this game stand out heads above the rest. Why should people continue to play it? Give me ONE viable answer... and don't say Expansions because I've seen colossal screw-ups when it comes time for expansions when dealing with EQ. Yay. I can fly in space. Yay. I can ride a mount. Those things should've been put into the game already. I'd understand if this was BETA, but huge enhancements such as those are things that you should give to your customer base to entice them, not keep them around. I guess it's the little things, but what it boils down to is MONEY. You have no pride in your work unless it pays you a little more than the last thing that you sasquached. Another shining example of corporate GREED? How much did you pay for your sunglasses to wear ingame? SUNGLASSES for christ's sake.

Anyway, this post is getting long... the short version. Don't follow the trail that you've OBVIOUSLY been proceeding down. Stop worrying about the money, get some people who are proud of their work in your office, put out a game that's got no bugs and that has some sort of content. STOP nerfing things and start fixing things. It seems to me that the expansions that are coming are meant to entice new members to this version of BETA because you plan on losing all the others who've been so loyal to you so far.

~Zatarra on Kauri

Dude, when it says your ticket hasn't been looked at yet, it means the CSRs responded, they wrote some new stuff, and YOU haven't look at it yet. I know, I've gotten many responses to my tickets, and I always get that notification. I think 80% of the "slow csr response" complaints are due to people misunderstanding the wording of that stupid notification.

You probably got a few "haven't looked at yet" notifications, and you got more and more angry each time, while the CSRs were probably writing "hello? anyone there?" Then after about 3-5 tries they probably closed your ticket due to non-response.