What exactly are we paying for?

The substantial changes to Star Wars Galaxies are making headlines, in the New York Times, Wired, and Yahoo. The story is always the same, of long-time players of SWG leaving the game in droves because of the changes of the New Game Enhancements (NGE) patch. People are demanding their money back for the latest SWG expansion Trials of Obi-Wan, because many of the features added in that expansion have been made obsolete by the NGE patch two weeks later. So we have to ask ourselves what we are actually paying for.

Many of the people leaving found that they had developed their characters along a path that wasn't supported any more by the new version of the game. Of the multitude of 32 skill trees and combinations possibilities, only 9 character classes remain, and professions like "creature handler" simply don't exist any more. Imagine you log into World of Warcraft and get a patch message that the paladin and shaman classes have been discontinued due to balance issues, and that your character has been transformed into a priest or warrior instead. You would be as upset as the current SWG players.

Or more extreme, imagine any MMORPG having a serious computer crash which erases all characters including backup. Your account is still there, the world is still there and unchanged, but you will have to create a new character and re-start from zero. I think many people would leave the game in question at that point. Because a major part of the game in a MMORPG is developing your avatar, and if your previous investment of time and effort in that development is erased, there is no more interest in continueing to play. We are paying for a certain continuity, a persistent world. We are certainly happy if new content is added to this world, but we don't want it fundamentally changed.

Of course the game developers of Star Wars Galaxies aren't totally unaware of that. But it seems that the game was going downhill before, and they hoped that they could win more new players for their new, faster, more accessible SWG than they are losing old players because of the changes. Obviously the horror stories in the press don't help. Nor do the numerous bugs that the NGE introduced. Creating a lot of hype for a game from 2003 was going to be difficult anyway. SOE isn't releasing any numbers, but I don't see SWG in any top 10 games sales charts, and Amazon lists the SWG Starter Kit at rank #999 in the Computer & Video Games category (where WoW is at rank #10). It is possible that SWG will crash and burn now, and be shut down in a year or so.

The scary thing is that both being shut down and being changed into something very different is a definitive risk with any MMORPG. I don't usually play old computer games, but at least I *could* still play them if I wanted. People that would want to play the original SWG can't do that. And nobody can play Earth and Beyond any more. MMORPG have been hailed as persistent worlds, but in reality they are more transient than other games.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:21 PM Permanent Link