Originally Posted by
Delta One
“The rule was, the best things in the game had to be made by players, and the other rule was everything had to break,”
“That sense of being part of a social fabric is missing in even most MMOs,” Koster says. “It’s just not there. We don’t have the social infrastructure for it to be able to happen. How can you be a loyal customer of a given weaponsmith in World of Warcraft? None of the infrastructure exists.”
And, like most veterans of the early days of Galaxies, Popovici eventually fell in love with the social scene, especially hanging out for hours in cantinas after a full evening of hunting other players.
Popovici only had a few months to enjoy Galaxies before the Combat Upgrade utterly transformed the game, and his friends began leaving. “Players had to restart and relearn everything they could do,” he says. “A lot of my friends didn’t want to spend months to learn the new game.” He stuck with the game for two weeks after the Combat Upgrade, but with most of his friends gone, he soon had no reason to stay either. He walked away from that virtual world.
I've been here for years and haven't been on EMU or on the forums more than a handful of times in the past couple years but saw this and these quotes really hit home for me and felt I wanted to post this. They very much speak to why I loved SWG. The way I read them is basically that the game wasn't built as just a sandbox. But basically intended to be a social playground in Star Wars. Everything built around fostering times where people would spend time TOGETHER, reliant on others. Everything had to break so that you had relationships with people (I read as intended to not be yourself on another account). As long as you have friendships in game then the game works and is amazing. When that is lost (as I feel is the biggest issue that happened with BOTH the CU and NGE) is the biggest blow to its "gameplay"
"There’s something about being on this side of the code that kind of ruins playing the game,” he says. “I know too much about how things work to actually play and be mystified by it again.” - This is my same problem and why I can't bring myself to play here anymore (might not unless jump to lightspeed comes as I just didn't spend enough time to know the ins and outs of it). But I don't really believe it is a knowledge problem itself. It's we have discovered the parts of the game that weren't ever balanced out to MAINTAIN the social aspect to the game. 90% composite didn't exist in the VERY early game (required hunting in groups EVEN FOR XP, which was maybe my fondest memory of the game. This meant needing a Doctor/CM for healing/rezzing, a scout for camps, even combat professions that became useless [state driven carbineer] were useful to the group). Doctor buffs - high ones didn't exist in the game leading to people wearing different types of armor and having players with just normal clothes in combat, along with HAM stats on weapons and armor (Weaponsmiths creating different weapons that had different HAM amounts, damage, or speed [lower HAM could be more useful than capping speed before buffs]), even specials in combat weren't always able to be spammed in combat unless you hurt yourself in another area (low base stats, no armor, lesser damage gun for low ham, etc).
Every profession had a role to play and REQUIRED cooperation with others. Prebuff/armor made parts of the game 100% inaccessible without friends. Doctors played ATK providing healing to wounds (I know I was one) at med centers. Entertainers required ATK play until macros were discovered (and guess what, with 1 character per account/server people still played them! And there isn't an excuse that the player base is smaller because as the team has pointed out many times, the population here often EXCEEDS SWG at its peak). There is COUNTLESS other examples of things like this that drive SOLO play instead of the original intended FORCED SOCIAL play. Unfortunately, I feel that it is the commitment to staying 100% true to the game (while the purest form), that may eventually cause those that really desire to have that experience again to never achieve it due to the broken endgame mechanics that the original team were never able to balance before they just scrapped the game. It's pretty clear the game wasn't intended to be group based UNTIL master elite professions existed then became a solo game.
