Despite the announced shutdown of Star Wars: Galaxies and the approaching new Star Wars-based MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, loyal subscribers don’t want Galaxies to end. They’ve begun a petition to try to convince Sony to let the MMO live on as a free-to-play MMO.
The petition asks Sony to convert the game to a ‘freemium’, microtransaction-based MMO, and that Sony consolidate players onto a smaller number of servers and facilitate character transfer to reduce operational costs in order to keep the game running. The petition has already gotten thousands signatures in a few days.
One of the petition leaders posted:
We are not your typical gamers.
We are not a commodity.
But if you look at the recent decision by Lucasarts to shut down Star Wars Galaxies, you might be inclined to think we are both of those things. Lucasarts thinks that we are a non-perishable commodity that can be shoved into a shipping crate and moved down the road to their next project. That is not the case. Not even close.
We are a vibrant community. We have seen our ups and downs, but we are only stronger because of it. We have endured all manner of broken promises and misleading “improvements” to this game, and throughout all of it, we have continued to build our community, and show support and loyalty to this great game. But we didn’t do it because of a game. We did it because of our community here.
(more…)
In before Herr_Alien. 🙂
Come on Paul! How many podcasts are you going to miss?
@GOG says customers hate DRM: Of course they do! Just like you said, DRM only hurts the customers and not the pirates. And yes, please bring back games filled with physical content, I would love to have stuff like that.
@QOTW: Sorry, don’t know of any DRM that I could tolerate. I know that pirates shouldn’t be accepted, but unfortunately there’s nothing that can be done about them.
@DynamicJul
😀 Actually it is a nice change. The time zone difference usually works in my favor (Eastern Europe), but it’s not completely impossible for somebody from US to get in first.
@EA forum bans cause game bans:
So apparently they didn’t fix the issue yet … they’re still using one database to handle the authentication for both systems.
If you think of it, you don’t even need two databases with the same user/password data, you only need separate databases to store forum bans from whole-account bans.
Correcting the bug should not be that difficult and it will make a huge impact for the better.
@piracy’s up 20% in past 5 years:
Games for free? Who would think this would ever be a lucrative business? 😛
I for one would pirate the shit out of Assassin’s Creed 2, just to point out that intrusive DRM is not ok. I’m not that much into that kind of game though, so …
@GOG sez customers hate DRM
And for good reason. As long as the code reaches the client, any DRM measures in it will be bypassed. Not might be bypassed, not could be bypassed, WILL be bypassed.
As for physical content, well, you still have those Deluxe editions.
@Steam user database cracked:
Not the best of the possible news. I don’t like to have the credit card info stored on servers, and in my envision of an online store, the credit card info is never stored. Yes, with every purchase you would need to type in the number again, but unless you check out very often (instead of putting more items in the basket then checking out) it should be quite ok.
@QOTW:
Steam, and the regular CD-key.
Jonah, regarding DynamicJul’s comment, I think you mean pseudo-code. And it’s not really about pseudo-code; as long as you know (1) what you want the program to do and (2) how to do it in one language, it will be easy to get the same thing from another language. The main hurdle in all software companies is not about learning a new language, is more about figuring out what the software you’re making is supposed to do.
Actually my time zone is GMT +1 so it’s the same. Also, I forgot to mention that my country doesn’t have things such as ‘Microsoft offices’ or ‘video game shops’ so I have to buy everything off the internet and it isn’t possible to fix an Xbox 360 over the internet.
Wait… taking fallout 3 apart and putting it back together again? This time it’s a brand new engine, so even if they learnt some stuff from the previous games, it’s not like they could reuse that much this time as they have done between previous games.