SWGCreatures Forums

You really think Julio will care if we e-mail him? Our letter's would all just go sraight to his junk mail. He has some sort of vendetta against CH so it is not comming back to the main game.

Trust me, hundreds if not thousands of people quit SWG 'cause of there being no more CH. First they nerf the hell out of us. They lie to us about the CH necklace to make us have pets upto lev 70 and add the bogus grind your pet upto its full size patch. To top it all off, they unleash the NGE and totally remove CH. SOE says that SWG is still strong, which is another lie. I personally know 100 people who quit that game since CU and NGE. So imagine the scale of people who are left playing if I out of countless thousands of people and numerous servers know that many who quit.

There are threads that pop up in the SWG forum every now and then begging for CH to be reintroduced. These threads run for dozens of pages. I have told Raph Koster on his personal blog site that CH is the personal \"sine qua non\" (Latin for \"without which, nothing\") I would need to see in place before I would even consider resubscribing to SWG.

None of it helps.

About the only positive thing that has emerged so far from my own efforts is that it finally helped smoke out a confession from Raph that the NGE was a major factor, and probably the deciding factor, in his decision to leave SOE. And that, in turn has seemed to make life a bit more uncomfortable for Smed and Co. It's amusing to see the contortions they go through to try to put a positive spin on things, or to shift personal blame for the NGE off their own shoulders.

Here's a sample that Smed put up on his own blog site:

[quote:7874e4dea1]With the exception of the DC Comics game we�re working on, each of these games is an original IP. Our teams in San Diego, Austin, Seattle and Taiwan are excited about working on game worlds that we�re developing ourselves. [b:7874e4dea1]It�s often frustrating to work with third party IP. There�s a constant battle over what the right direction is for the game, and from our own recent experience, it�s not something we enjoy. It very often puts handcuffs on what we can and can�t do and, frankly speaking, it�s a lot harder to make great games when the IP holders don�t understand the online gaming market.[/b:7874e4dea1] [i:7874e4dea1](NOTE: Emphasis added by Iakimo.)[/i:7874e4dea1][/quote:7874e4dea1]

Note the backhanded slap at unnamed \"third-party intellectual properties.\" Since SOE currently runs only two games using such IPs, it follows that he can only be referring to Star Wars or The Matrix. Seems the Big Happy LucasArts/SOE Family ain't quite so happy as they're trying to make it seem on the SWG forum.

The full text of Smed's post, titled \"This And That,\" can be found here:
[url]http://stationblog.wordpress.com/2006/08/01/this-and-that/#comments[/url]

And you can read Koster's comments, including his confession about how the NGE impacted him, here...
[url]http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/07/25/escapist-interview/[/url]

...and here.
[url]http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/07/19/community-building/[/url]

I found the following Koster comment particularly poignant:

[quote:7874e4dea1]The question that honestly keeps me up at night is �how do I not disappoint those who invest their passion into this.� I may personally get disappointed when my ideas do not pan out � but the thing that gets me is really hearing from the audience who felt let down....[/quote:7874e4dea1]