Star Wars Galaxies dying by end of year

Well, this will help TOR. There's that, I suppose.

Not that I plan to play TOR, but I like Bioware and want their efforts to succeed. A failed MMO can mean a failed company, after all.

I was about to say "they could release the server code as freeware if they're not gonna host anymore", but then I read the rest of the thread and decided "why bother".

I think Sony's official attitude towards its customers is "Hahaha, FUCK YOU," so I don't think they'd release the source code even if they were no longer hosting the game.

I'm not sure how much cross over exists between Galaxies and TOR. Well, between old Galaxies and TOR.

They've already said they're not releasing the code.

Which will bum out thousands of players. My wife totally digs the crafting system (due to complexity and richness), even if I had a few issues with it. Like, why can't I run resources through a smelter or refinery to improve their stats? or alloying various metals together to make a better product? They allow you to reverse engineer various ship parts and junk loot to make bits and power up parts and stuff...

Tatooine was my favorite planet, as it had lots of cool references to stuff that happened in the movies and things. A pity it was more or less noob planet (with exceptions, like Krayt Dragon hunting and high-level Tusken Raiders).

Naboo was pretty and had a lot to do, but lacked... something.

Our guild made a city on Rori (moon of Naboo), lots of fun.

Only other planets that stick out a lot woudl be Kashyyyk, Dathomir and Mustafar.

Kashyyyk was lots of fun. Great way to level up from 50 to 80 or so if you do the Ryatt Trail and some other stuff, and some of the junk loot is nice for decorations. Since I played a smuggler, I managed to score an awesome mid-level Jawa Ion pistol that had killer DPS for being only a mid-50 level weapon. Used it for a long while until I got my server-capped Lamprey pistol.

Dathomir can get you from 75 to capped, and the heroic instances are great fro finishing up your toon with the heroic jewelry sets and other bonuses. our guild woudl usually run each instance once a day, so we got pretty god at speed-running them. Everyone knew their place and their job, and aside from some epic and hilarious TPK snafus, we had a blast. I think my favorite heroic instance would be Tusken King. Lots of good loot to be had as you fight off hordes of high-level Tusken raiders. Even with a full group, it'll be a busy time.

Mustafar was kind of a mess. I think they threw it in to cash in on the Episode III nonsense, and aside from looking totally awesome, it felt disjointed. I did like the HK-47 stuff, though. Well-written quest.

Yeah, the game had its faults, but I'll miss it.

Sony's gone berserk again.

Check this part out:

Several players have emailed Venture Beat stating they're joining a class-action lawsuit against Sony shutting down the petitions; one player said that Sony pegged him as a "ring leader" in the protests and threatened to permanently ban him from its games and file criminal charges against him for trying to cause "unlawful harm to the company." Say what?

(I'm reminded of the scene in which Andy Kaufman screams multiple times at Jerry Lawler, "I'm going to sue you! I'm going to sue you!" Sony is in the Kaufman role here.)

Wait, build a city? Explain! EXPLAIN!

Wait, they're saying he caused unlawful harm to them by...asking them nicely to keep a game going?

They have no grounds for a class-action suit either though. They're being just as silly.

Well, who's sillier? Because Sony is acting like the petitions are somehow illegal.

@ sony

Lol, "unlawful harm"

We will sue you... for doing unlawful things!

I don't know why they won't release the code, probably some fucking exec

Exec: But this code is ours, we built it!

Sensible person: But your not using it anymore, your abandoning the game.

Exec: Well we could use it again some day!

Sensible person: No, you won't.

Evil exec: Then the OCD fuckers have to move to TOR, which will bolster it's out-of-the-gate numbers to justify it's price tag to our stock holders. MWHAHAHAHA

I wonder what the guy actually said.

I only really remember Tatooine when I think of the game, mostly because I wasn't a very serious player, so none of my characters ever really outleveled it. It was fun to just hang out in a cantina and listen to the various player musicians.

Sony may not be able to open-source it, if it includes third-party code that isn't open source.

Players: Please Sirrah. I want S'more.

Sony: THAT IS UNLAWFUL HARM. We are going to SUE YOU.

Oh, SOE. How you fail yet again on such an unbelievably high level.

You are demonizing Sony without waiting to hear their side of the story. Please wait until you have all the facts before you cast judgement. Thanks.

To be fair, Sony Online Entertainment is a really easy target to demonize.

There is no way criminal charges would actually stick; Sony is probably just hoping to either deter them with the threat or drown them in legal fees.

Gee, i'm sure they've never done either one of those before.

Well, Sony could sue them knowing they won't win, but drain him financially anyway with legal costs.

It's rather hard to wait for Sony to tell us their side of the story since they typically wait for 2-3 weeks before bothering to say anything about certain controversies. And that's assuming they even bother to acknowledge that there is a controversy... I mean, knowing Sony they'd just say "There are no people wanting petitions on our forums, because there are no petitions on our forums."

edited 30th Jun '11 11:05:53 AM by Swish

or they could not threaten legal action for a perfectly valid way to reach the company.

Yep, you can build a city in SWG. First, you need to make a civic center, essentially, the capital building. You place that down, and get four of your friends to declare you mayor. Congrats, you're now an outpost. Your friends place houses within the build radius of the outpost. You can't build within those limits if you're not a citizen of the city. As more people move in adn plop down houses and stuff, the outpost becomes a village, then a town, then a city, and finally, a metropolis. As it levels up, the mayor can place civic structures (a banking terminal, decorations, a shuttle stop) within city lines, and each level up makes the build radius grow outward. Lose citizens (due to political shennanigans or people just not playing anymore) and your city will lose a level. So, you'll find the abandoned ruins of a ghost-town that hasn't seen activity for months on some planets - or a bustling metropolis with over a hundred players all living there, along with all their other buildings they can place guild halls, factories, resource collectors, diners, theaters, and the like.

Every month, the mayor's position goes up for re-election, but if no one challenges the incumbent (by registering in the civic center), it defaults to the incumbent again.

Usually, a city is synomonous with a particular guild or alliance of guilds, and might be factionally aligned (although there are neutral guilds). With the big Galactic Civil War update some months ago, they also added regional control checks based off of what faction controls the area. Have a rebel-guild living in a city in Imperial-controlled territory? You'll see Imperial NPC troops patrolling around. You'll have to do rebel-themed missions to wrestle control of the area from the Imperials. Enough of that control shifts over, and you'll see Rebel troops patrolling the area instead.

Our city on Rori has a bunch of Imperial poayers who AFK bunker-bust, so they keep driving the region towards 100% Inperial control. We have to do missions all the time to drive it towards neutral so that we don't get ran out of our homes by high-level Imperial NPC's...

There's some HUGE cities on Tatooine, as there's lots of flat worthless land that's perfect for building on (unlike Rori, which is all hills and crap it seems). Merchants will set up shop, and I'm rather fond of cruising to the town outside of Mos Eisely for clothes shopping. Smart town-founders will plce their city near a point of interest, and rake in fees from peopel using their shuttleport for fast travel to and from the area. Like, Mos Krata, a player town near the Krayt Dragon graveyard. Since Jedi's gotta have those Krayt Dragon Pearls for their high-level server-capped sabre, they'll pay a small fee to use the shuttle to the area, plus, there's a cloner terminal in the city too, so you can get right back in the thick of it if you get deathblowed by a nasty high-level Krayt.

My wife coudl go on and on for hours, as she actually did the mayoral thing for a long time, founding a city from nothing. We almost got up to Metropolis status, but then our guild founder wnet beserk and folded the guild and crap went downhill. We ended up merging with another city and guild after that, but it was all for the better.

edited 30th Jun '11 11:22:54 AM by pvtnum11

I just learned of this.

I began playing the game in 2004 or so (right about the time they allowed players to buy ground-based vehicles for themselves), stopped playing a little while after the "Combat Upgrade" which pissed me off with all the changes. In 2009 I got back into it, since I saw that starting again would be really cheap and thought "Why not?"

Even with all the changes that made things worse, I found that they had fixed a number of the problems I remembered and that a lot of the good stuff was still there. (The city thing was cool, and the one thing I still maintain that SWG did well was the space combat part of the game.) They had actually improved the game...but it was just too late I guess. There was too much bad publicity surrounding SWG, too many stories of how SOE didn't deserve your money (stories that were accurate, at least for a time), and it was difficult to generate new interest for a game that came out in 2003.

I do plan on playing Star Wars The Old Republic, and I went to SOE's site to cancel my SWG subscription, since not only do I want to use the money to pay for the new MMO but I also hadn't played SWG in several months and didn't see the point in continuing to pay fifteen bucks U.S. each month for a game I wasn't using. Still, reading about how its days were now officially numbered made me kind of sad in a way. It's ironic that I'd feel that way when I was already leaving, of course, but I still had a lot of good memories of the game, both before it got ruined and after it kind of got fixed. It's one thing to leave something, but to find out that it is soon going to cease to exist...

Anyway, here's what I liked about the game:

-The emotes were always great and entertaining, both the lines and the animations.

-You could own property (as in land and a house) and, before the CU at least, have an enjoyable gaming experience that involved something other than running around killing things. (My original character was a doctor who healed and buffed players that did choose to run around killing things and had been wounded. At that time, if you took a certain amount of damage in combat then your health would not regenerate to its full amount because you were too banged up. And the more abuse you took, your max health would continue to go down until you got a doctor to treat you. I thought that was realistic, and the fact that I got XP for making medicinal items in a lab and for using those items to heal or buff other players didn't hurt. I also enjoyed chatting with my patients.) I don't know how many other MMO's that's true of now. I know that's the case with Second Life, but apart from that.

-I'll miss my yacht. The yacht was the same type of ship as Lando Calrissian's "Lady Luck", except without the modifications and weapons. It was basically a house that you could fly all over the galaxy in, where you could display various decorations and trophies and such, where you could invite other players for parties if you wanted, etc.

-I'll miss my pets. In the original version, if you were a Creature Handler then you could tame baby animals hanging around a herd of adults (everything from nuna to RANCORS) and raise them to adulthood, at which time they could fight alongside you if you wanted them to. Later on, any class could get a pet, albeit now you needed to take DNA from creatures and make a clone of the animal. Even that had its fun parts, though, since your skill in cloning and the quality of the DNA determined how tough your pet would be, and you could also do things like create a blue bantha, say.

EDIT TO ADD:

-I can't believe I forgot this since it was arguably the best part of the game, but space combat was always a lot of fun. The "Jump To Lightspeed" expansion was one of the few things that they did 100% right and didn't screw up.

edited 18th Sep '11 12:28:17 PM by KilgoreTrout

You know, there is a project to re-create it, from BEFORE the massive screw up. SWG Emu. I don't know how far along, or trustworthy, it is, but it looks interesting. I have not tried it yet though.