I agree with that, I allways have. And for that they will pay the price. There is no excuse for empty promisses and bad business practices. But people tend to leave for three reasons. One resent SOE bad attitude (I understand that), others got too accustomed to the old combat system/UI and some can't get over the devaluation of things in game - being that property or profession value. These last two require an adaptation from a player, what I was talking about above. Let's take jedi profession and mandalorian armor for example. When there was just a few jedi on servers nobody heard what they were complaining about (if they were at all). But a mass of voices was heard seeking to become jedi. Hologrind jedi have then devalued the jedi profession of the first few who becaeme jedi. I bet there was an outcry amongst the original jedi, but it wasn't heard, since there were so few of them. Later on the village people devalued the jedi profession for hologrinders. An outcry was allready audiable, since there were more of these around. Respec jedi and AFKers have devalued the profession for village jedi and all before that. And there was more ranting to this, simply because there were a lot of village people. Now jedi noobs have completely devalued the profession and work of all former jedi. And the outcry is enormous, for there are loads of jedi who lost to this. Who is it to blame? I guess both, the general public for wanting and SOE for giving. Both were completely aware of what was gonna happen since jedi were tested on TC, but both were ignoring it.Novall wrote:I guess Oporim, the fact that they wasted our time with all these revamps and basically lied to people who were waiting on them is what makes people more mad then anything else.
Now same will happen to Mandalorian armor. Spitefull people say it is the right thing to do, to make it commonplace: 'if they lost their rare jedi, BHers should loose their very rare mando armor'. And SOE will for sure give it away. Why? Perhaps to make it more available to larger public pool, or simply because combat level has been extended to CL90 and there is no need to keep mando armor locked inside DWB anymore since anybody can now solo that place too. Remember, half a year ago people were crying in the GCW forums to make another alpha profession or to extend the endgame over CL80. Now this has been done and people would eventually have more mando armors either from being more able to solo BlackSuns and DWB or if SOE just gives it away. Either way it becomes cheap.
Why am I talking about this. This is the belongings/profession attachment we create while being in game for too long. And this should not happen. Things will eventually change in a MMO, because a lot of people playing it will have a significant effect on the gameworld either indirectly (through changing game economy) or directly (by wanting or demanding something). The previous devaluations to jedi profession were also less visible, since they happened over time. The latest one and possibly the mandalorian armor quest will happen suddenly, so they are more visible and tend to create more dust around them. But they are basically what we have been seeing in this game all along, just stretched over longer periods of time. I'm just saying, don't get attached, adapt over such changedUI / devaluation issues.
Now that you brought it up: can anyone remember when did that guy post the insider secret, that it will come to NGE? I'm trying to put together a picture. Because I have a feeling this NGE was not something planned for a long time ahead. I bet at least up to BountyHunter publish SOE had their original plans and NGE came about later. Why putting out CU in the first place? I bet they had a LA revision and got the message "what is this chaos you have created and you are unable to maintain now? Cut down the number of professions immediately and work on those if you are unable to have 32! Make jedi starting profession since there are allready that much! etc etc". And they tossed together a bunch of code in 3 months time, included all what they were working on for revamps (ranger becomes spy and these sorts of things - code for ranger upgrade could be allready written and was just used). Also if you remember the atmospheric flight demands / promisses, without NGE and crosshair targetting it would be impossible (if it is about to come). Being a programmer I just have a feeling they hade fragments of code written and on an order "cut it down, immediately!" they tossed it together and here we have NGE. Buggy, because they were in a rush, but ...
Listening to a thousand voices (masses below you and owners above you) can be damn hard. I have my bits of understanding for the DEVs, too.
