Just how badly do forumites want Pazaak? Pretty damned badly, apparently!

Seeing what they decided to call "slot machines", I would hope more effort than they gave there.

I would be perfectly happy with a straight-up KotOR implementation to start. Even to finish, but I'm probably in the minority there. (PvP Pazaak sounds hella fun.) -bp

Ok, fair enough. Now about your criteria for inclusion, "mentions the word pazaak:"

• Does that only include original (not quoted) text?
• And did it not also include people who do not want pazaak and bother to say so?
• Wouldn't it include this post, which does nothing to indicate that I desire pazaak?

Frankly, you have done nothing to show that more than a tiny number of people really want pazaak.
All you have is a showing that the word pops up, which could also mean people hate the idea.

Here, let me explain by analogy: go repeat your methodology using the world "nerf" and see if that shows how many people want things in the game nerfed. (Of course we all know it won't show any such thing because many uses of the word "nerf" are complaints about something being nerfed, not requests for a nerf.)

TL;DR: "There's lies, damn lies, and (improperly constructed) statistics." paraphrasing Twain I think.

And do you think such an implementation would attract any new players to the game? I would not bother with it myself, I can play 2D solitaire card games already.

Such a stripped bare-bones 2D version seems only to serve existing pazaak fans, and it seems a bit incongruous with SWTOR's voiced 3D norm. Sounds like a small investment with an even smaller payoff; if so, is it worth BW's time?

And there's the rub - if BW doesn't invest enough, it will be worse than doing nothing at all. As yet, we do not even have an indication from more than one pazadvocate of what "enough" would be.

And we have not even touched on how you would bot-proof the pazaak game to prevent it from being farmed, if it gives any kind of reward.

Too bad really. SWTOR is an amazing MMO and having some kind of social mini game would help with one of SWTOR's major problems - lack of socialization.

But I have to agree with other posters that have stated we will probably never see it. All of the new stuff that has been released has been iterations on features mostly already in the game. I doubt we will see anything that requires significant extensions to the engine to make possible. I would guess EA is focused on making what ever they can off their existing investment in SWTOR and not really focusing on aggressive growth.

I wonder how things would have been different if they had delayed shipping the game by 6 months and not released the mess we saw at launch. In it's current form I think SWTOR would have been a success.

Damn! You plan on analyzing the topic this closely as well? XD Your replies are in orange.

Standard format for replying, as usual.

Fun with statistics:

--- Blue Milk has been around since 1977. It has existed in the Star Wars universe for nearly 100 percent of the time we've even known about the Star Wars universe. I expect that every fan is familiar with blue milk and that it would play a central role in this game, since "time since creation" is a very accurate measure of "importance to a literary universe".

--- Pazaak has played a minor role in zero movies, and showed up in TCW almost zero times, clocking in a grand total of nearly zero minutes of screen time. Comparatively, Blue Milk has managed to get somewhere more than 10,000% more screen time.

--- Ignoring instances where only the name was mentioned, Pazaak has appeared in two games and 5 books or short stories. Blue Milk has been included in 12 books or short stories and 2 movies. If we include name references, Pazaak's count explodes to a whopping 12 works, while Blue Milk manages to scrape together only 31 references.

--- Pazaak has inspired two websites to create web-based games. Blue Milk inspired an award winning fan movie, has been referenced a number of times in various Star Wars comedy sketches, fansite discussions, various other web-culture sites.

--- Pazaak has 67,000 Google hits. Blue Milk has 588,000.

Conclusion: Blue Milk is more of a mainstay of the Star Wars universe than Pazaak is.

That's your hyperbole, not mine. I never said it was trivial. I said that the bulk of the SW fanbase has no idea what it is, and I stand by that judgement.

Noted.

Also for clarification: No one has ever suggested that display or computational difficulty had any impact on the inclusion of Pazaak.

Because it takes time and resources. In software development --especially game development-- you are always balancing the value of a feature versus the impact it has on your development schedule. For fans who have zero knowledge of developing, the situation always looks clear: "Oooh. Cool Feature! Add it in before we release!" For developers or anyone who has experience, it gets seen as: "Hmm. Interesting feature. Is it worth the $150,000 that we'll spend in developer time and schedule changes?" What if adding the feature means that you can't finish in time to be ready for some other team? Do you reschedule both teams? Is it worth pushing back a delivery date? What if you have only contracted some developers for the next two weeks? What if your testing department is running on strict timelines and you delaying your schedule one week means you have to wait four weeks to get QA time again?

The issue here is that this "seemingly easy" minigame only seems easy. It's not. It only seems easy because you don't have any experience in actual software development ...and that's fine, I don't expect everyone in the world to be a developer. I do, however, hope that they listen to developers when they're discussing development. I've related a story about an actual bug that I fixed and how a two line bug fix took some 60 man-hours of work over four weeks. Of that, only 20 minutes or so was actual coding. The rest was taken up by QA, build scheduling, integration and release management. Your "seemingly easy" minigame would require its very own QA, beta testing, and integration work.

Now that the game has been released, there hasn't been much talk about it because soon after release, developers said that they really wanted to add in Pazaak, but that --shockingly enough-- it would take a decent amount of time and organization and that if/when it got added, it would be in an expansion that they'd advertise. So... if that's still true, they can't talk about it here, because it would be revenue-generating information and the and (if I understand correctly) the FTC requires that any announcement of revenue-generating changes to EA's products be made available to the public in an official release.

Commenting on a forum thread is not an official release.

It wasn't done from the beginning because they thought the amount of time put into making it wouldn't give the value they could get elsewhere, with the same amount of time. I'm not saying their decision was correct or not, but that is the reason why.

Anyhow, I'd rather have Sabaac then Pazaak.