Politician Archive

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SWG-Runesabre wrote:
If you ask any veteran gamer of an MMO as to why they still play their chosen game after many months (or even years!) invariably the answer is "because of the people I know in the game and play with".

Message Edited by SWG-Runesabre on 05-12-2004 01:46 PM

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Given that the reason people will stay the SWG is the community of players and the tools that SOE crafts for SWG players to communicate, I'd like to point out how mishandling of Player Cities and the Player Associations killed the community of players I was invovled with. At the height of it we had 40 "actives" and 30 or so "once a week" players. We started our guild in the first month after launch last summer. The first complaints surrounded a guild hall move. As the PA Hall takes up so many lots, when the hall owner got tired of the early problems with the game we decided it was time to move planets. When we moved our guildhall from Tatooine to Dantooine we were forced into a guild name change as the server was convinced our guild already existed. Many tickets were filed, and the ultimate solution offered by SOE:
"Register under a new PA name and hope that nobody takes yours when things become available."

Our guild grew quite a bit while on Dantooine and not everyone felt like a move to north central Dantooine was great for non-combat folks. (this was before mounts or vehicles so it was quite the run from the mining outpost). When things started getting busy in the ring around Coronet we moved the entire PA into a central spot about 1100m north of Coronet just on the other side of the river there. At this point our PA had nearly 50 members and so we started a guild bank. As many of the core members in our PA were launch and beta players we had quite a stockpile of harvesters, resources and weapons. The guild bank let us start recruiting at a much faster rate, any stealing aside.

I can still remember the morning when I logged in to find my factory, the guild bank, and two houses in the neighborhood missing. Millions of units of resources, multiple back packs full of heavy harvesters, containers of weapons, gone. We immediately started ticketing this issue. Finally SOE support refused a bunch of the tickets from people other than a house owner, and the final result from SOE on this house attended by dozens of active guildies:
"You must have forgotten to pay maintenance on the structure. The burden of proof lies upon you to provide an in-game email showing the last time you put maintenance in the structure."

The two generous members who'd put the most into the bank, both playing since launch, quit the game. What was the point of recreating this style of item bank? Would we get the same snotty response from the CSR's?

The next major PA fiasco was the Player City launch. Many justifiably angry comments have been put forth on these forums about the handling of the actual launch of the Player Cities. Sitting where we are now, there shouldn't have been caps on the planets, as the number of hurdles to getting a player city going would have provided the drain to the system to pull apart many of the extra player cities. I will add that to get a player city up on player city launch day, two of us logged in at work and ran around like mad doing the dance to place a city hall. Eventually we ended up back out in western Dantooine. Our spot on Naboo wasn't even an option as the cap was hit in what seemed like minutes. At this point we had 40 actives members logging in at least daily and another group of probably 30 who were around "sometimes." As there's no means of contacting in-game folk from the outside world, we built a PA website and forum so we could support our addictions while we were out-of-game.

We elected a mayor who'd been with the guild since launch and was in beta for SWG. When we ran happily for about a month, before the first problem we ran into was that the rolling terrain of NW Dantooine. When we placed a shuttle port it was way in the ground and so no droid was available. A minor annoyance at best. After many tickets we finally got a CSR in-game who promplty told us that moving of structures up or down was not something the were "allowed to do anymore." I'd also like to point out that the CSR's seemed to be very uninformed about Player Cities on any level. It seemed that the most-informed CSR's read the forums, but only because they were players outside of work. That's right, they were getting the exact same info as I was getting. No more, and in many cases, much less.

This brings us to X-mas time, and all sorts of staff changes, and a general tone in all the Dev posts of "We're sorry if it sucked up till now, but just wait till you see the new 'interactive' us in 2004!" Away went the General Discussion forums, away went the complaints about how things were for the player group as a whole. (okay, that's my personal take, but it's pretty damn close to the truth. Now the only way to make an issue on the forums is to bump it with worthless chatter, cross-post, or figure out the magic words that a dev is searching for.)

We were also fighting off raids from a nearby imp city that had taken the medium house walling to extremes! The entire city was completely walled off except for one mine filled alley near a pair of faction bases. Handy! (I just flew into there the other day and it required breaking through a gap between houses and then warping through a building somehow to get out of there) Various CSR's told us that the city was warned that they couldn't build the walls, but there was no action on the part of SOE. The TH response to the "walling" issue in the forums was highly unhelpful and meant that they actually extended the walls as they'd fufilled the "not walling in a faction base" requirement by the skin of their teeth.

At this point our city began suffering due to a major "unforseen" problem. Our mayor was AFK. He'd been playing for months and months, and then he just up and went away. (We did eventually hear that his comp broke as he left for a business trip, he took weeks to fix it, and as far as I know he still logs in now and again.) We had a player city with no control. Thank god he didn't lock down the zoning in his last play session. We had very limited area to expand into so city growth that didn't leave some of the largest areas for giant footprint structures like the cantina caused real problems. The real problem with this was that the Auto-voting of the mayor meant we need to get our voting body to go for a new mayor and by this time we'd started to face a net loss of playing members. Many of them felt the game was FUBAR'd and those of us that didn't, had serious doubts as to the desire for dev's to keep any of the launch player-base in the game. There was no dev response on this issue, other than the useless "it's supposed to be hard to get a player city up and running." So we did what many player cities did, Cross-server trades with other mayors in need. Another Band-aid fix applied by the players when the Dev community wouldn't listen, or worse, didn't care. The cost of this was a dozen long-term guildies deciding that the Player City was a lost cause and a split that never healed that could have all been avoided if there would have been an active response to any of the number of tickets submitted on the issue, or 6 week inactivity timer from the launch of player cities. This wasn't a planning failure on the cities' part, it was SOE failing to plan Player Cities, while still trumpeting their successs in every public venue for advertising.

The lag on Dantooine introduced with the Player City patches killed off the lovely Graul spawns from so many it was dangerous walking around town to one lair a day at startup and then again a few hours before shutdown. Our vendors were glacially slow, and what had been a multi-million credit group of vendors on Dantooine never group passed 1 million a month out there. (yes, other factors, but vendor lag was like a hole on the boat I'm bailing water out of)

To keep the end of this short, we got the mayor changed. This weekend I helped her get the AP points to become master Pol. The city is going to die next week when we pull up city hall. The 12 of us still in the guild are slowly moving to Naboo to a city with 200 some on residents and hardly a soul to be seen anywhere in town, but they seem to stock the vendors. It's a giant, empty city much like the NPC Cities other than Coronet and Theed. I'm so glad we have a player city cap so that all these behemoth cities can prevent new players from making more cities on the planets. Perhaps it's to combat lag. I do know that the avoidance "of over-population with player city after player city" didn't matter because we still have player house after player house in any area it mattered. Our community of folks which functioned wonderfully for a few months, and not so wonderfully for many more months is now a collection of 8 players on Naboo. We all do about one solo play session a week waiting for the Jedi changes, and JLS. That's what keeping us in game, waiting for promised content that upon arrival will most likely be far below expectations. I can't count the number of "If X sucks, I'm quitting" statements that came true in SWG so far.

The only good to come out of this game is that we have so many folks that ABSOLUTELY will never play an SOE-partnered game we have great groups in all the other MMO's that launched this spring!

I won't leave until I see space expansion. I'm just too big of a star wars fan, and I came to this game because of a dream of flying from planet to planet, adventuring with friends. I'm thinking sometime next summer my dream will come true.

Message Edited by Snikrop on 05-19-2004 11:43 AM

Knowing people willencourage people tostay, but it won't keep them from leaving.

In my guild, which was founded very early, only about 5 of the original 30ish remain. There seems to be about an 80% attrition rate with new players (only 1 in 5 will seem to stay more than 2-3 months). Of those that stay around... maybe 1/4 have lasted more than 6 months.