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For Online Star Wars Game, It's Revenge of the Fans

For two and a half years, Emily E. LaBeff, chairwoman of the sociology department at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Tex., spent 30 hours or more each week playing the online computer game Star Wars Galaxies. Not for research, but for fun.

Logging on to the game on weekends and many nights after class, Ms. LaBeff directed Athena Wavingrider, a powerful Jedi she created, through the far corners of the Star Wars universe, fighting on behalf of the Rebel Alliance against the tyranny of the Galactic Empire. Like millions of other online gamers, Ms. LaBeff, 54, discovered a camaraderie and friendship with other players that were far more important than the play itself - relationships that can be hard to replicate in "real life."

"It's replaced my television time, and I don't go to the movies anymore," she said, chuckling. "I don't keep my car as clean as I used to. But it's not because of the game itself. It's because of the people." She added, "We all had this wonderful second life together."

And now it's all gone, at least in any form that Ms. LaBeff and thousands of other Star Wars Galaxies veterans would recognize.

Last month, LucasArts and Sony's online game division, which have jointly run Star Wars Galaxies since its introduction in 2003, suddenly turned the game upside down, making the most sweeping changes ever made to a persistent online game. ("Persistent" means that the game world is constantly running, and players may log in and out as they please.) Unsatisfied with the product's merely moderate success, the companies radically revamped the game in an attempt to appeal to a younger, more trigger-happy audience.

Previously, the game was unabashedly complicated, appealing to mature, reflex-challenged gamers with its strategic combat style and deep skill system, which allowed players to carve out profitable, powerful niches as entertainers, architects and politicians. Now the game has become self-consciously simple, with a basic point-and-click combat system that is meant to evoke the frenetic firefights of the "Star Wars" films.

To Sony and LucasArts, the changes are a necessary step to help the game appeal to a broader audience. (The companies do not release subscriber figures, but many gaming experts believe that before the changes, Star Wars Galaxies had about 200,000 subscribers, each paying about $15 a month.) But to thousands of players, the shifts have meant the destruction of online communities that they might have spent hundreds or even thousands of hours constructing. Now many Galaxies players are canceling their accounts and migrating to other online games. They are swapping tales on "refugee" Web sites with names like Imperial Crackdown (imperialcrackdown.com). Ms. LaBeff, for instance, said that she had canceled all three of her Galaxies accounts and had joined a new guild in World of Warcraft, another game, with her old Star Wars friends.

"Someone might wonder, well, it's just a game, what's the big deal?" said Robert Kruck, 54, an engineer for Motorola who lives in Schaumburg, Ill., who said he had canceled seven of his eight Galaxies accounts. "But for many people it is much more than a game," he said. "It is a part of their lives where they have invested huge amounts of time building a community. And that community has been based on a sophisticated, mature game. So now, for them to take an adult-level combat and economics simulation and turn it into a mindless game for 10-year-olds is a violation of that community."

For Sony and LucasArts, the idea has been to make the game more "Star Wars-like," tying it more explicitly to the films.

"We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base," said Nancy MacIntyre, the game's senior director at LucasArts. "There was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an opportunity to be a part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves."

Ms. MacIntyre said Galaxies had lost "significantly more" than the 3 to 5 percent of players who typically leave any online game every month. She said she expected the game to return to its previous subscriber levels in six months, a process she hoped would be accelerated by the introduction of a new television infomercial hawking Galaxies later this month.

"We knew we were taking a significant risk with our existing player base, but we felt so strongly that we needed to make these changes for the sake of the game's long-term future that we all held hands, LucasArts and Sony, and went forward," Ms. MacIntyre said.

It may, however, be a rocky path, because the revamped game is receiving mostly horrible reviews from players. On Gamespot.com, a leading game Web site, about half of the more than 600 players evaluating the game have rated it "abysmal." Some 14 percent have called it "terrible," and 6 percent have described it as merely "bad." The game is described as "perfect" by about 12 percent and "other" by 18 percent.

"We just feel violated," said Carolyn R. Hocke, 46, a marketing Web technician for Ministry Medical Group and St. Michael's Hospital in Stevens Point, Wis. Ms. Hocke said she once had as many as 10 separate Galaxies accounts but has canceled all but one in the last two weeks.

"For them to just come along and destroy our community has prompted a lot of death-in-the-family-type grieving," she said. "They went through the astonishment and denial, then they went to the anger part of it, and now they are going through the sad and helpless part of grieving. I work in the health-care industry, and it's very similar."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/arts/10star.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1134229785-NFmw7gJ3sjLLd9Ph6IBzzQ


Ya know it is a sad day whan NY Times grabs this story and posts. This game is so screwed it is not even funny.

"Someone might wonder, well, it's just a game, what's the big deal?" said Robert Kruck, 54, an engineer for Motorola who lives in Schaumburg, Ill., who said he had canceled seven of his eight Galaxies accounts

jeje?

how the fuck can you justify spending that much cash on a game each month?

I had a tough time justifying a 2nd account for a while in EQ

8 accounts = 120 bucks. I throw 120 bucks away going out on a Friday night sometimes to a really nice restaurant and movie. Plus this was probably his main form of entertainment.

That is a bit ridiculous, but was the norm for SWG. The base age of SWG players was 40s-50s which isn't the audience Lucasarts wants for the game, since they have WOW envy.

It's a shame. Now they have another WOW clone, versus the only original and in depth game on the market.

Should read the flames on the SWG board. Some of them make Ugzug Flameage look like a small bic lighter.

One person suggested throwing Smedley and Torres into a room with 1025 rabid hungry hamsters.

Lyion wrote:8 accounts = 120 bucks. I throw 120 bucks away going out on a Friday night sometimes to a really nice restaurant and movie. Plus this was probably his main form of entertainment.

That is a bit ridiculous, but was the norm for SWG. The base age of SWG players was 40s-50s which isn't the audience Lucasarts wants for the game, since they have WOW envy.

It's a shame. Now they have another WOW clone, versus the only original and in depth game on the market.

no matter how you try to break it down, there's no way I could justify spending that much cash per month, on a game

I was paying for 5 EQ accounts in my heyday of guild leadership. I consider that silly now, but back in the day I'm sure there are people who trumped me.

nerd

The hits keep on coming

http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,69816,00.html

Players of the massively multiplayer online game Star Wars Galaxies are feeling a bit like the films' besieged rebel army these days. To them, LucasArts is the evil Empire, raining down terror in their alternate universe.

Over the past month, countless longtime Galaxies players have quit playing the popular online take on the ubiquitous film franchise. Their grievance: a controversial, sweeping redesign of the structure of the game that they say has ruined the fun -- and made irrelevant the years of work they have invested into their in-game personas.

"It's now a shoot'em-up game for adolescents, not at all conducive to our play style," says Carolyn Hocke, a web technician for Saint Michael's Hospital in Wisconsin, whose character A'thena was mayor of an in-game city on Tatooine and owner of a bustling shopping mall. "People who we grew to know over the last couple of years are gone. Cities are ghost towns, guilds are gone. My galaxy is gone, my game is gone."

The changes to Star Wars Galaxies, developed by Sony Online Entertainment, are aimed at bringing in new players and keeping them around to pay the $15-a-month gameplay fee. To this end, the so-called New Game Enhancements, or NGE, abandon much of the complexity of the original design, which let players choose from more than 30 different professions, then carve out an economic niche for themselves in the Star Wars universe.

The number of professions under the NGE has been reduced to nine -- one of which is Jedi. In the previous version of the game, only a precious few dedicated, lucky players could hope to attain the use of the Force. Now, any player can choose that path from the game's onset.

Greeting this influx of lightsaber-wielding newbies is a more action-based experience, with a fast-paced, point-and-click battle system that replaces the strategic encounters of the original.

So what's the big deal? It's not merely that Galaxies players -- some of whom have been playing as the same character in the same virtual world since the game's 2003 launch -- liked the old version just fine. It's that the characters they've spent all this time building are gone.

"There is a sense of loss," says network security specialist Brian Orr, who had been playing two characters -- a master bounty hunter named DevNull and a Jedi Padawan named Chewbaccu -- for more than two years. "I attempted to play by the new rules for a few days. However, the gameplay was horrid, and the bugs were intolerable. Needless to say, I canceled my account."

"Most of these games subsist on models of labor investment," says Timothy Burke, associate professor of history at Swarthmore College, who has written academic work on online games and contributes to the MMOG blog Terra Nova.

"You put in a lot of time, your character changes and grows," says Burke, a Galaxies player himself. "So to be told that in two weeks, your labor investment, your year and a half's worth of work, is going to be destroyed, is tough for some people to take."

"The NGE sounded like a cruel hoax," says Hocke.

Adding to the controversy, the NGE was implemented literally days after the series' latest expansion pack, Trials of Obi-Wan, hit stores. The pack promised significant upgrades to character classes that, in fact, were scheduled to be terminated.

Sony Online Entertainment "marketed this expansion knowing full well that the NGE was going to be released," says Orr. "Many customers bought this expansion thinking they were getting enhancements to their existing professions, when in reality the release of the NGE two weeks later removed most of those professions."

LucasArts has since offered players a refund on the expansion pack.

Julio Torres, the game's executive producer at LucasArts who originally announced the NGE on the game's official forum, notes that veteran players will get other special enhancements in the new game, like exclusive access to the game's best lightsaber models. These Elder Jedi will also glow with a blue halo, like the ghost of Obi-Wan in The Empire Strikes Back.

Of the disgruntled players, Torres says he finds their lack of faith disturbing.

"We understand that change is hard sometimes," says Torres, "but the new game we have is more Star Wars than ever. Players that actually give it a real try find it immersive and more fun than ever."

Ultimately, LucasArts is banking on the NGE being irresistible to fans of the series who want a more accessible, familiar, Star Wars-like experience. "Playing a Jedi is fun," says Torres, "and games are meant to be fun."

But many players have decided not to stick around and find out. How many players actually abandoned their accounts is unclear. Understandably, neither LucasArts nor Sony Online Entertainment is anxious to volunteer the numbers, and Torres would not comment.

But, says Burke, "there are plenty of people reporting that they've quit. There are forums popping up with ex-Galaxies players forming guilds in new games."

One such forum, called Imperial Crackdown, was founded by Brian Orr as a home for "refugees" (who can no longer post on the official Galaxies message boards) who want to keep their community active and find new games to join.

Many, including Orr and Hocke, have begun to play the popular World of Warcraft. Members of the forum report that their new WOW community alone numbers 300 ex-Galaxies players.

Burke agrees that the NGE may draw in new players, but says the game might not hold their interest. "The people they're aiming for are casual players who enjoy fast-paced combat and who aren't looking for overly complicated games.

"The design aspires to that, but it's sitting on top of the old game. So when they get out of the game's new tutorial mode with Han Solo, they'll be saying: 'Now what? How is this Star Wars? Where's Darth Vader?'"

And Burke doubts that many former players will go back. He points out that most were already frustrated with what they saw as LucasArts and Sony Online Entertainment's poor handling throughout the years of the game's many bugs, glitches and inconsistencies, and that the New Game Enhancements "were the maraschino cherry on top of a sundae of failure."

Whether Star Wars Galaxies succeeds or fails, the saga of the New Game Enhancements has been a stark reminder of the realities of the new online gaming medium. Traditional video games don't just disappear. Gamers may feel betrayed if the sequel to their favorite game isn't as good as the original, but they can play the original any time they want.

Not so for those who enjoyed the original Galaxies. It's gone forever.

I hate starwars fans so much, I might just pick this game up to spite them.

Interesting analysis here

http://www.gamergod.com/article.php?article_id=3169

God that game was screwy.

Lyion wrote:I was paying for 5 EQ accounts in my heyday of guild leadership. I consider that silly now, but back in the day I'm sure there are people who trumped me.

Xarton?

lol.... Check out this PC Gamer write up...

http://www.cirune.com/swgnge1.JPG

http://www.cirune.com/swgnge2.JPG