Droid Engineer Archive

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Jenden wrote:
If none of their customers stick around to demand that channel you'll never get it anyway. Its all an issue of whether or not you can be satisfied without it. SWG has the potential to be(and is already a good way towards being) the type of game that I've always wanted. None of the other MMORPG's come even close. If I give up on this one there's nowhere else for me to go.

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• $15/month keeps the servers up. Buying new copies of the game makes them money. There are a couple ways they can do this:




1. Recommendations by existing players to their friends


2. Existing players buying second accounts.


3. New players


• There is little incentive to make the player with the single account happy with just one account becausee they make more money as more accounts are purchased. As long as they don't make it obvious that for certain playstyles you need a second account, they win because they can "hook you" with your first one, and probably a year later you'll get another one or will have a friend (or more) get one to help you.

All of my arguments about hybrid combat/non-combatant charactersfall on deaf ears because frankly, it's just not in the business model. However, making sure the ones at the complete opposite ends of the spectrum arn't isolated is in their interests. Making goods and services easier to find for the 75% of the population from the other 25% is in their best interests. Making sure the 25% can accomplish their tasks are in their best interests.

What I see them trying to do, is capitalize on 2 & 3 at the moment. Once you have 2 & 3, you can start to shift away from 3 to 1 during "off-peak" (read: Lucasfilm not releasing new content) times.

I realize this sounds a bit pessimistic about current situations, and I rarely get into topics like these. Allow me to show a bit of what I'm thinking. The first reactions are always to panic. The first couple days after I read the initial CU docs I took a day or so off from the live game to think. I cooled down a bit, but I'm still in the somewhat frustrated phase I was in about a month ago(which is kinda odd for me).I just need to think a lot of things through. I need to see reasoning behind why some things are the way they are in the new system. Once I get to the reasoning, I'll probably move onto acceptance.

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Straker_Atrella wrote:

Here is the flaw in their thinking, which they just simply can't seem to understand.

There is TONS of competition out there with "combat" games.

They come and they go all the time. Combatents will come and go with them as well, trying out the new combat games. SWG always had one thing that was constant, it's crafting system and economy. This is something that no other games have, it attracts and KEEPS people. Even if those people that are kept, they are 25% that are constant. Those 25% have combat friends who they keep around as well.

The crafting system and economy in SWG was NOT broken, sure it needs a little tweeking, but you don't do that with a sledgehammer.

By destroying the current crafting and economy system, you start to lose some of this "constant" playing base. Once your "steady" playing base starts to leave, they take friends with them, then it begins to look like an avalanche.

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