Pistoleer Archive

What's wrong with Galaxies (an honest appraisal)

What you, as a customer, think is "right" or "wrong" with Galaxies is largely a matter of perspective. The professions/skills you choose, your personal style of gameplay, your personal goals within Galaxies, will all affect your perception of the state of the game.

So for starters, what's my perspective? I'm a longtime computer gamer who is relatively new to the MMORPG genre. I started Galaxies on the day of its release and have played pretty much daily since then. I dabbled with Merchant, then moved on to my current profile of Master Pistoleer / Master Creature Handler. I live in a Player City that was planned by some online friends while Galaxies was in Beta. I dabble in PvP, do very little RP, and try to provide support to other members of our City who have attempted to hologrind their way to Jedi, although I have not chosen that path.

So, from that perspective, and with the input of some of my friends in Galaxies ... what's wrong?

1. Quality Should Be Job 1 -- It's Not: Since the first day of release and our introduction to the Little Database That Couldn't, SWG customers have bemoaned the poor quality of the game's code. We all know it was pushed out of Beta prematurely, and we all know that the devs have been playing catchup ever since release because of this regrettable decision. The fact that, more than eight months after release, a Pistoleer could have 12 special attacks, but that only two of them work even remotely as intended (as detailed exhaustively on the Pistoleer forums), is simply inexcusable. The same is true for pathing, movement, auto-storing and special attacks bugs with pets. As we near the Space Expansion, there is no reason to think that SOE management will decide that it's better to walk before you run ... they seem quite committed to trying to fly before pets can walk & chew gum at the same time.

Code is inadequately tested on the Test Center servers, resulting in unnecessary bugs that are introduced with Publication and persist for weeks, or even months. For a while there was a lot of talk about fixing these issues by bringing Character Copy to the Test Center for a more rigorous test of code in a production-level environment. That talk seems to have faded, and we're left with exactly the same inadequate testing procedures we started with. The results are obvious, and the lack of progress is a major disappointment to customers.

We are frequently told that inadequate testing and poor quality control is somehow "natural" in the MMORPG genre, or that this is due to the "complexity" of the game. I don't know anyone who finds such excuses very persuasive. The complexity comes from deliberate design decisions. Designing a game that is more complex than your ability to properly test and bug-fix is simply a poor management decision. Don't build what you can't properly maintain.

2. The Galactic Police Action: Most of us with even a passing interest in PvP were eager to see what shape the devs would give to their oft-hyped Galactic Civil War. I think there is a concensus among players that this has been mostly a failure.

First, it is a failure because there is no strategic aspect to the War. It is a series of random tactical firefights, but at the end of the day (or month), there is no real consequence to winning or losing these engagements. For that reason, there is never any sense of progress or accomplishment in the GCW.

Second, the mechanics of PvP strongly discourage anyone interested in combat tactics from participating. The poor design of TEF, particularly GTEF, has turned off so many people who were otherwise strongly motivated to participate in PvP that the overall quality of play is harmed. Players are reduced to drawing up lists of players and guilds they won't PvP with because those players or guilds are GTEF exploiters. For months this situation has festered with little or no comment from the development team. We can't know if they simply dismiss this as a significant problem despite customer input, or if they can't find a way out of this design box.

Finally, the "B" word (balance) hangs over the GCW like a stormcloud. The GCW is fundamentally about PvP, and PvP at the moment is fundamentally about choosing one of a small group of templates that give you enormous tactical advantages. Several supposedly 'elite' combat professions are helpless as babes against certain other 'elite' professions. Perhaps the 'combat balance' we are promised, that has become the standard answer to most reasonable requests for fixing systems that should have been fixed in Beta or certainly months ago, will actually resolve some of these issues. I'm skeptical, frankly, because every big piece of new code pushed to the Live servers so far has only brought a raft of new quality issues and balance problems. Since this 'combat balance' will, like releases before it, be inadequately tested against real-game conditions and is being designed by people who have consistently demonstrated a poor understanding of how the customers are actually playing the game, I'm hesitant to put much faith in the 'balance' as the answer to many problems.

3. It's the Economy, Stupid: One of the 'groundbreaking' aspects of Galaxies was meant to be its player economy, and the crucial role of crafters in the game. I think many crafters genuinely enjoy their place in the game, and I'd call that a moderate success. But an 'economy' requires stability, predictability, information, and reliability. Galaxies does not shine at any of those things.

There are no tools to inform a crafter about prices across their galaxy, so they must usually just guess at a "fair" price, put it on the vendor, and hope it sells ... try lowering the price if it doesn't. They must also hope that a large number of items that they invested time, materials and effort to create will not become relatively valueless because of arbitrary and mostly indefensible decisions to retroactively diminish those items' worth, as recently happened with FWG5 pistols. This decision damaged customer confidence that what they buy today will be valuable tomorrow. It damaged crafter confidence that what they invest resources in crafting today will ultimately be worth more than it cost to craft.

Nothing damages an economy more than a lack of confidence by buyer and seller in the stability of the system. Occasionally the devs drag out the specter of "money sinks" and their necessity for the good of the player economy, but most longtime players seem skeptical that there is any valid argument there, in the face of rampant credit and resource duping that flooded every server with millions or billions of credits. We have no reliable numbers to work with here, as we're kept in the dark about the true nature of the problem for the player economy, but most crafters seem to recognize that, for particularly rare items, price will almost never be an object because somebody out there will have a ridiculous amount of duped or e-bay'd credits to blow on a rarity. Again, customer confidence is damaged by this perception of imbalance.

4. The Dilbert Effect: Ultimately, Galaxies' problems all boil down to one central issue: management. The concensus among veteran players in our Player City is that the Galaxies project is being managed, or mismanaged, right into the ground. You get the impression that Dilbert's "pointy-haired boss" is running the show.

This shows up in numerous areas. A prime example would be what's happened to Droid Engineers in Galaxies. For six months they struggled through innumerable broken systems and an almost complete lack of interesting droids that anyone outside a very narrow market of specialists would have a desire to buy. Finally they were told that the neglect of the profession would be resolved by a nearly exclusive focus on that profession in the January and February Publish schedules. Then they became aware of a "Droid Handler" profession that would be imposed as part of this solution, although almost none of them wanted this approach and it would do almost nothing to address their central issues. Now we're in March and very little has been done, because we're told that resources have been shifted around internally to deal with the GCW and Space Expansion coding. What we've been told will be done in the Publish 8 timeframe isn't getting anyone very excited ... it looks like a Band-Aid, and not a very big one.

The examples could go on for twenty pages, Droid Engineer is just an easy one. In this case, the Galaxies management team let a problem slide completely out of control through lack of attention, promised to fix it, then delivered a weak (and late) set of fixes that left both DE's and the people who wish there was something useful to buy from DE's frustrated and wondering what's next.

I don't mean to suggest that managing a large development project like Galaxies is easy ... it's not. But it also isn't impossible to do well. Not only has it not been done well so far, but there is really, from the customer perspective, no sign of progress. Deadlines are still missed, goals are still murky, poor-quality code is still pushed onto the Live servers, and developers still seem to consistently misunderstand or ignore core customer concerns.

The exisiting management team seems unable to overcome the inertia of the premature termination of Beta. What they consider "major" efforts like the Imperial Crackdown and Droid Invasion are seen by customers as very minor cosmetic changes with little or no impact on the game's central problems.

5. Conclusions -- Is There a New Hope (or any)? I confess to being a pessimist here, because I really don't see an acknowledgment of the scale of the problem at SOE. Whenever an SOE representative posts to our forums, they seem glowingly optimistic about how much progress has been made, but to the customers I know this optimism seems strangely at odds with our actual experience using the product ... we're not that thrilled with the Emperor's new clothes. If you don't admit the size of the problem, you'll never make the changes necessary to really fix things.

Galaxies was and is a project of immense potential. It is beautiful to look at, and to listen to, but all too often frustrating to play because of the disconnect between its potential and its execution of fundamental systems. Without major, almost revolutionary, change in its management team and development processes, I'm afraid it faces an apocalyptic crash in the coming year.

How many times have you heard someone who so very much wanted to like this game, someone you enjoy playing with, say "Only the people I play with are keeping me here" ? How many excellent players did the game lose over the last six months out of simple frustration and disappointment? My fear is that when the first really viable, reliable alternative to Galaxies comes out, the exodus will start as a trickle, but will grow to a swift rush as everyone follows those people who kept them in the game out the exit. At that point, you'll have underpopulated servers and insufficient cash flow to support fixing the game, and all that potential will become a distant memory. Then you can only hope that SOE wraps up the project and closes the servers with a spectacular Deathstar attack on every planet for the last few hardy souls to witness.

As for me ... still here because of the people. But I see about half of our city edging toward the door in hopes of an alternative with better focus and quality, and when they go, I'm right behind them.