Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

For those that were back on Everquest during the forum wars may understand what I speak of. We fought every Nerf Verant threw at us. We posted, we discussed, we flamed, we got banned. But we still played EQ cause at the time it was the best. Smedley (President of Sony Online Entertainment) showed up and tried to coral us in, couldn't, so he shut down the forums and turned them into an automated moderated post-it note board. Many of us knew then we could not fight to fix EQ so we left. We wandered for a bit in the nothingness of MMORPGS at the time until we found the pre-launch forums of SWG. We found out that Verant was going to handle it as they were bought up by SOE and we felt a darkness, but we pushed on, cause we were sure LUCASARTS was in true control. For 2 years before game launch those were days filled with debates about the timeline, weapons, classes, PVP vs PVE, city boundaries, vehicles, and every thing a kid who grew up playing with star wars action figures ever wanted in a video game. This was before KOTOR or Battlegrounds or Jedi Academy and we all felt SWG was going to be our ultimate Star Wars experience. We watched as our game was shaped into a vision that we all could live with. We watched as Beta started and was rushed, we watched as the launch of the game by an experienced MMORG company was still handled badly. We should have known then that Verant/SOE was going to screw it up. We watched as promise after promise was broken. Those that bought the special collectors edition, those with the sunglasses? We were promised that the sunglasses was just the start, that many more IN GAME items and options would be given to those of us that paid the $75 for the collectors set. That was one of the first promises they broke, we never received anything else, none of the Tattooes, the clothes, the vehicles we were promised before launch for buying the special edition. We then saw as main features were pushed 6 months back from launch. We watched as classes were nerfed into oblivion and utterly destroyed to never fully recover, the creature handlers know of the great Ch nerf of Nov 03. We watched as soon the Jedi craze became an epidemic as NO Jedi were unlocking. We couldn't even find out the WAY to unlock Jedi. We chased Hermits through the fields we wore HELPER tags and we entered every fixed building on every planet hoping to unlock the jedi secret. Rumors flew of magnificent quest filled adventures that would unlock the Jedi, yet when the truth came out, it was anti-climatic. Then we watched as too many jedi unlocked as Christmas Holos were given out and months later we find out the jedi code was changed from 5 to 8 professions and most people at the end were having to unlock all 32 professions to reach jedi. Another promise broken. We watched as many professions needed fixing and were ignored cause of the Jedi problems cause it was obvious there was no Jedi system in place before launch and the Devs were wingin it. The new popular phrase became, "We will fix it in the CU (Combat Upgrade)." This was used for every question for 8 months on anything non-jedi related. We then find out that the Devs push the CU back until after JTL cause well, they need to get an expansion out cause they promised us Space ships a YEAR ago before launch. Another promise, a HUGE one, again broken. Now the CU comes and we find out it isn't an upgrade but a complete new game system. It has changed every single character in the game and has forced many of us to change the characters we have had for 22 months to something else. The CU hasn't fixed HALF of what they promised to fix for the last year. We still have many classes that need revamps that are barely dealt with in the CU. Now Smedley shows up again and says the CU is a good thing and that after the CU we will be making many more changes. We have waited for the last 2 YEARS for the promised changes and now again, you push them back. Smugglers and SL have waited 12 months for revamps and still have to wait. The CU did not FIX anything, but introduced a slew of new bugs and problems instead that you will need to spend the next 6 months ironing out. Worst of all is the fact that NOW you have FORCED all your paying customers to Beta Test a bug riddled Game system as per Dallas Dickinson Producer for Sony Online Entertainment comments in this article. [...] "Dallas Dickinson: We've been testing it for a full month, both internally and on the test center. We were simply not at the point of getting enough feedback from people. A number of things had come out, and we had fixed all of them. It's a tiered thing when you're working on a massively multiplayer game. The number of eyes you have on any system, especially one as fundamentally large as the combat system, that increases the rate at which issues are borough to the surface. We weren't getting enough new issues, so we had to bring it out in front of the community, take some pain (which we have), and get the real issues brought to our attention. That's the process we're going through right now. Issues are reported to us, and we're responding to them as fast as we can, but we had to go live in order for us to see these issues." This blatant use of the customer base as beta Testers has crossed the line of good game ethics, as they just admitted that they have forced a flawed game on their paying customers. After all the broken promises and trust that SOE has whittled away from us, they have the audacity to force the players to be beta testers now? It is my hope that now that Episode III is done, LUCASARTS takes SWG away from SOE finally and starts to take a true interest in the fans still here. Actually, I just hope LUCASARTS makes a NEW SWG MMORPG and shuts this one down due to poor management.