tr808 wrote:why do all u guys need to bash Soe constantly?
Well, well i'm not a former star wars galaxies (SWG) player, sony (the owner of SWG) damaged the game pretty badly a year or so ago. It was a semi-mature, not necessarily new player friendly (similar to ryzom from what i hear) kind of game, with many many classes.
Basically what sony did was release what they called the NGE (new game enhancements) which were supposed to be a fantasic update, but turned out totally destroying and remaking the current game. The cut the number of classes down from many to 12 or so from what i hear, and the previously near impossible to obtain class of Jedi was made significantly easier to obtain so that most could reach that level from what i know. They probably did all sorts of other things to the game, but since i wasnt there, i dont really know.
Their intention was to make it a user friendly experience in hopes to draw new players to a game that was getting long in the tooth, what they essentially did was alienate and force out all/most of their existing playerbase at the time effectively ******* the entire game for older players pre-NGE. Thats sony from a SWG perspective.
As a former EQ/EQ2 player however, i personally see a large company such as sony, as one of the better options for ryzom. I had no problem with sony's handling (for the most part) of those games. They have a large art department, as well as programming pool to draw from to support games, both of which nevrax appears to have neither.
EQ2 has bugs fixed promptly, and major updates monthly, with smaller patches weekly/bi-weekly. I seriously think that sony has learned its lesson from star wars, they have bought matrix online as well, which was in a similar place as ryzom a year or so back, and it seems to at the very least survived intact and is at least alive and kicking, with relatively better success since being bought out. I would assume that Matrix online would be a better thing to compare how they would treat Ryzom than comparing it to SWG, but thats just my take on it.
If what we want is for ryzom to stay the same, then yea, a small company would do fine, ryzom.org also, but without more resourses than nevrax had, they probably wouldnt have any better luck i wouldnt assume. Without better graphics updates, new content, and regular updates patches, the player base will continue to die out slowly over time.
At least with a company with SOME money to spend on developing the game, we have some sort of chance for improvement. Sony may not be the ideal candidate for this in manys eyes, but it'd be hard to think of a more likely company to be able to fulfill all these "wishes" that we write about endlessly in other threads.
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