Welcome to the POE NGE

As a long time gamer the current balance manifesto really reminds me of the Star Wars Galaxies NGE. This created a split and divisive community by implementing sweeping changes to the game. It also assigned the reason for the changes to the actions of the players, completely ignoring the fact that any issues with the game were a function of the developers previous decisions.

I know my personal opinion doesn’t count, however, right now this feels like a Smedley move and GGG should at least be aware of the lessons of the past.

The split happened already over the course of the last 15 leagues as GGG let the game get to this state. The upcoming nerfs won't cause any sort of split, just shine a light on what's already there.

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Onecardtoomany wrote:

As a long time gamer the current balance manifesto really reminds me of the Star Wars Galaxies NGE. This created a split and divisive community by implementing sweeping changes to the game. It also assigned the reason for the changes to the actions of the players, completely ignoring the fact that any issues with the game were a function of the developers previous decisions.

I know my personal opinion doesn’t count, however, right now this feels like a Smedley move and GGG should at least be aware of the lessons of the past.

It's not nearly that bad. SWG basically wasn't even the same game after NGE dropped. It was still a Star Wars game, but outside of the aesthetics and locales it was no longer SWG. It also didn't help that they released Mustafar and then retconned nearly everything it offered almost immediately. Players who hadn't already been drawn away by WoW abandoned the game in droves, myself and my trillions of credits on Bria included.

For me, It’s more the way the community is feeling that they are being ignored. I quit Chimera after the NGE and the guild split with people either going to wow or EQ2.

I might be wrong and I hope I am, it just feels the same to me.

It could be more akin to the CU than the NGE, just from the opposite side of the spectrum. That dumbed SWG down quite substantially and didn't go as planned. It was their first failed attempt at being more competitive with WoW, and all it really did was divide the community and hasten the game's demise. Where CU was one of various nails in the coffin of the game, NGE was the lid.

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aggromagnet wrote:

It could be more akin to the CU than the NGE, just from the opposite side of the spectrum. That dumbed SWG down quite substantially and didn't go as planned. It was their first failed attempt at being more competitive with WoW, and all it really did was divide the community and hasten the game's demise. Where CU was one of various nails in the coffin of the game, NGE was the lid.

Pretty much this, although it really is apples and oranges.

The Devs of SWG actually made the mistake of listening to their players TOO much and practically weaponized them.

It started with an issue with carbineer where a skill would permanently knock down an opponent in PvP.

That really was the only thing that need to be tweaked. You have a small group of PvP players demand the class be destroyed through nerfs but the majority just wanted that skill fixed.

The developers did indeed destroy the class and listened to that tiny group of PvP players. That started a feeding frenzy where the players realized all they had to do is gang up on a profession they hated and were losing to in PvP and sure enough the developers would nuke every class the player base complained about going above and beyond even the players' recommendations.

That completely destroyed any sense of balance in the game, hence CU and eventually, NGE.

It was a shared destruction.


The other part of that was SWG hit 300k subs really quick, which pre-wow was an amazing achievement. But then it plateaued and started to slowly bleed out, which was the other reason for the CU and then NGE - the majority of people play Star Wars for a Star Wars story, and that, for all its amazing technical achievements, was the one thing SWG really lacked, and it paid for it in the end. Its why SWTOR went the other way with Story-first, and despite a lot of really bad mistakes, why they are still weathering those and able to hang around (although I got stories about that game too....)