Just 1 sandbox planet, please.

So let me get this straight?? If we are against adding a sandbox element to the game we are either Fear Mongers or WOW drones..

Can any of sandbox people dig a little deeper and actually come up with a reason that we can discuss instead of just resorting to name calling..

Or is it because you can't come up with a reason to add sandbox elements, so you resort to name calling??

In either case.. I see no reason to add sandbox elements.. There is no reason to attempt to turn this game into something else.. Adding the fact that games with sandbox elements haven't done very well and you actually have a reason against such an idea..

SWG was bleeding subs to WOW.
LA/SOE were afraid to lose any more players and wanted to be competitive (so out came the NGE), but they are Shortsighted.

There are alot of people (and i imagine more so in this Dungeons and Dragons crowd) that prefer the Warcraft IP over Star Wars.

It was not that SWG was a bad game it was just never going to hold on to players that are not starwars fans.

I dont play WOW because i HATE elves, but that is me and that does not make WOW bad. I can wager that the majoirty of gamers are the opposite and prefer Elves over Jedi.

I never played Matrix Online because i could play a Starwars game and i never watched Matrix past the 1st one. Do you see the trend?

When you have an IP like starwars, you have to deal with the fact that some people dont care about starwars and no matter what the game is like, they will be happier on something they enjoy

So, because we may have legitimate gripes about the addition of sandbox gameplay, we are automatically fearmongers and gives you the freedom to create straw-men.

How cute.

Here's the deal: we're not "No-change crowd" and we're not trying to activly block "anything". We have a reasonable dislike about sandbox gameplay and don't want to see it here. Any comments about how it will be popular or "save the game" is immediatly called into question when no sandbox mmo made more than 500k subsribers for a long period of time, nor has any sandbox mmo's been made in recent years. The themepark subgenre has taken off like a rocket. It's a show of change of taste.
Yes, I'm sure SWG was great back in its day, but almost nobody wants that anymore.
The game is still a highly successful MMO, and all it needs is more content (of the same that it has) to keep people interested.

The SWG vs. WoW argument is a terrible comparison to use here. Different market, different technologies, different demographics. SWG always gets brought out by the flat earth crowd to try and justify the banality of this game as being commercially viable.

Thing is, a sandbox style game can work, provided 250k or so users is enough to make it profitable.

EvE for example is completely sandbox, and it does ok. It doesn't have huge numbers but enough to make the game profitable. If a game company is happy with that, then there's no reason they couldn't make a sandbox style game.

But most don't seem to be happy with a small profit, so they make games that are more theampark in nature because those have proven to be the most popular types of MMO's.

I appreciate your post, this is an excellent way to have a dialogue.

My use of the "sandbox" term is aimed at creating some of your own things to do.

Decorating

Non-instanced housing, hence my asking for a planet. cities would be great, but i'd take what i can get.

Exploring without "roads" and I love your hunting idea.

I'm fine with the crafting as it is currently, but being able to harvest would be cool. (I enjoyed making harvestor runs though.)

Player NPC vendors. Just because I liked visiting different shops looking for different items.

Look, all I'm saying is throw those of us who enjoy these kinds of things a bone.

None of this would interfere with the core game, just some time away from the monotony of....

its actually not a terrible comparison. prior to wows release swg was expected to be the first western mmo to break 1m subs. it had the money and the ip to do it. when it failed to reach those expectations and topped out at 300k it was widely believed that the mmo market was tapped, that there just really wasnt the playerbase to do it. then along comes wow, breaking 1m and continuing on without breaking a sweat and completely shattering the idea that the playerbase didnt exist. keep in mind that was when wow was in its infancy. at the time when there wasnt much of a market, or even really much of a market differential.

Am i not playing star wars?