Criminally grotesque game play …
However, I have some confessions to make. I only found out about the NGE last week when I was tired of the WoW login server crashing for whatever reason that night and I was surfing the SWG message boards to see what was going on in my former life. I read that there was an NGE, I went to the official site and read some more, resubbed, went to the Test Center, made a noob, and had a pretty good time.
However, now that it's live, I've come to realize that this NGE did indeed screw a lot of the community. I have been reading about the inability for handicap players to play the NGE the way that they played the original game. But the two things that I have learned in the last few days that are sticking out in my mind are this:
1) There is NO way that this NGE has been under development for any less than 9 months. There is far too much work in the quests, in the ground layout (new caves and the such), and in the classes, not to mention the artwork and scripting as well as some of the new voice acting. It definitely puts development work on this before the announcement of "Trials of Obi-wan". That leads me to my second point:
2) The announcement of the NGE coming the day AFTER "Trials of Obi-Wan" went LIVE is pretty damn low. Especially when you went to their site and could read that there would be "baby pets" available for Creature Handlers-- a profession that was completely eliminated in the NGE. What the Mustafar is that all about? SOE finally apparently relented and offered refunds to anyone who wanted it, but still-- you can't tell me that NGE was so sudden and secret that someone like Smedley thought it was OK to go forward with that kind of marketing when they KNEW that they were eliminating classes the day AFTER the expansion went live that had been directly marketed to. Or did he?
I have no idea what went through the minds of SOE and LucasArts for this, but looking back now this NGE was approached like someone driving a Mack truck through a garden. It's hard for me to believe that no one at SOE/LA knew that the game was about to be significantly changed and that the marketing for the expansion reflected a game that would no longer exist soon after, at least not in that incarnation.
I do a lot of work with consumer advocacy and I can tell you that just as there are good people and there are bad people, there are good corporations and bad corporations. There are corporations that care about the customer more than they care about his/her money and there are corporations that are the reverse. SOE/LA proved that they care way more about the money than they do about the people that have the money.
The NGE is really not an issue here to me-- personally, I think it's a decent direction. But the WAY that it was implemented is an absolute disaster and it really shows the lack of morality of the heads of SOE and LA that greenlighted this and thought that it would be ok to just spring it on the customer with a couple of weeks of testing when it had been in development for so long. And that it was OK to market their latest expansion to cater to an audience that was about to become extinct THE DAY AFTER THE EXPANSION WENT LIVE.
There's also the whole Tiggs debacle-- how do you fire your Community Relations Manager who is posting on the message boards around the clock to support the NGE the weekend before the revamp goes live? Something tells me that she may have had some misgivings about the way things were being handled, but it's pointless to speculate at this point. Bottom line is that not only was this a bad move for the company as far as PR goes, but I'm not sure that I want to do business with a company that fires people right before the holidays, especially single mothers with a child to take care of.
So to be honest, SOE went from being a joke to being repugnant. I actually resubbed for the CU to see just how bad it was, and it was bad. I re-specced, played for a few hours, paid another 12 months worth of maintenance on my house in Tattoine, hung up the pre-CU plaque in the house, and cancelled again.
I'm cancelling again and I am not coming back, at least not until people like John Smedley are gone from SOE and from gaming in general. Lying to the customer, firing people right before the holidays, bait-and-switch, not taking certain members of the community into consideration when you re-design a UI, and worshipping at the altar of the almighty dollar just so that you can show headquarters that you are a profit center is ridiculous.
Like I said, the NGE technically is ok with me. I even like the quests and the new user intro that puts the player in the middle of an adventure with Han Solo. But how that was arrived to is not something that sits well in my consciousness. I play MMOs because I like playing with other players and when the company screws over so many people that didn't do like I did and cancelled and stuck with the game for 2+ years doesn't sit well with me. The veterans that stuck with the game deserved a whole lot better than this and deserved a whole lot better than to be treated like pariahs in a game community that they helped build. These games are nothing without the community and SOE/LA has taken the stance that these players can be lied to, can be ignored when it comes to any special needs that they have due to handicaps, and can be fooled into thinking that the NGE is something sudden and new.
Not me. I like a lot of the NGE from a technical standpoint, but I don't like where it came from and the lying and deceit that was needed to get there. I'm not going to do business with a company that thinks that announcing a revamp the day after an expansion is launched is good business. I am also not going to do business with a company that treats the community in the way that SOE/LA has.
I'm done with SOE for good and I am encouraging all others to do the same. I have cancelled my subscription for the last time, especially since this is not about the game to me anymore as much as it is about the character of the company that I gave my money to. Smedley's lies and apologetics on the Slashdot interview that I just read did not impress me and drive a further wedge between me and SOE.
I'm also personally not doing any more business with LucasArts, whom I view as a willing participant in much of this. SOE is the primary culprit for me, but I think a lot of the blame for this also lies in the lap of LA, which undoubtedly pushed SOE into this situation.
Anyway, good luck to all. Gaming deserves better than what SOE/LA has done."
I canceled my account and filed for a refund of ToOW, I will never be coming back to this game.