why the SWG NGE and SWTOR KotFE comparisons for?

DMUK
Good to see you around!
Hope you are doing well

Most of the NGE comparisons are just click bait, most of the threads containing the topic are a mess.
Kalfear raised a good point too, the fear of the unknown.
And thats what i am putting it down to aswell,
No information, just speculation. Its not bIowares fault, information doesnt need to be all and final on announcement, but forum goers here are a heavy mix of Hater Drones here to complain no matter what, and Bioware Fanbois/Girls who will defend everything no matter what. With a sprinkle of reason, and normal chatter through out the threads

Hey Darka! I hope you're well mate. Long time no see

On topic, the next expansion is a mini reboot to cash in on Episode 7 before the game may get shut down next year. They will be 9 1/2 years into a 10 year licence (including development time) and there's been no talk of a renewal or extension. I am guessing the expansions success or lack therefore will determine if it is renewed.

Hey Darka! I hope you're well mate. Long time no see

On topic, the next expansion is a mini reboot to cash in on Episode 7 before the game may get shut down next year. They will be 9 1/2 years into a 10 year licence (including development time) and there's been no talk of a renewal or extension. I am guessing the expansions success or lack therefore will determine if it is renewed.

I guess you're big on hyperbole and making *$@# up. This has literally been known since about 2 years ago.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/20/e...-says-swtor-i/
try again troll.

If you opened your eyes and actually read that story, instead of being a copy/paste fanboy, you will notice that it does NOT include exclusive rights to Mobile and the ONLINE space, including MMOs.

You also forget that the licence between LucasArts and Bioware was made BEFORE EA swooped in and took everything over. Now, go find that egg to suck on.

what is the basis for these comparisons of the NGE and KotFE xpacs between Galaxies and TOR?

i mean is there hard evidence that KotFE is destined to be a failure? as i see a lot of comparisons drawn i am struggling to understand because right now there is a lack of information but that info is forth coming and a number of players here are mentioning doom without much to go on. perhaps judging it too harshly too early or am i missing some details here?

Star Wars Galaxies was an earlier Star Wars MMO, launched in 2003. There was a hybrid class/skill system - originally intended to be classless, but forced into changes due to the producers demanding a rushed launch - in which players could choose 4 or 5 (out of 30-some) different professions, including the ability to drop professions at will in order to level up new ones.

The game had a very rich non-combat experience - in fact, only about 10-12 of the 30+ professions were primarily combat oriented. Non-combat professions included things like Dancer, with performance skills that would buff the morale of customers, and remove the battle fatigue debuff; Politician, for the building and administration of player cities; Architect, for the construction of player buildings (which were placed directly in the world, not instanced like strongholds) and furniture; Tailor, for making clothing and light armors; Weaponsmith, for crafting weapons; Creature Handler, for capturing wild creatures and training them as pets (which could be kept or sold to other players). Each of these was developed to a level not seen in any other major MMO (except EVE Online, which hadn't been released yet).

But the producers decided to force the developers to rush the game out the door before they finished building most of the combat content. The devs literally flew some beta testers in to apologize to their faces before announcing the early launch. As a result, the combat portions of the game were rather lacking in developer-created content.

One key point is that, consistent with the MMO's timeline between Star Wars Episode 4 and 5, the entire list of known force users was: Luke Skywalker, Emperor Palpatine, Darth Vader. In other words, no player force-usage. However, the devs had in fact created a plan for players to unlock Force-senstive character spots in a system that they had intended to take years.

A few months after launch, another MMO called World of Warcraft went live. The business people got antsy because Warcraft's buzz was eating into all of Sony's other games and they were worried that SWG, the one holdout, would soon suffer. To counter this, they forced the dev team to start giving hints about how to unlock the Force-senstive slots - which was by mastering 4 of the 30-some odd professions, but each player's list of needed professions was different (and mostly unknown to them). Predictably, this caused a huge portion of the player base to start grinding away at unlocking every profession in the game ... or to quit. It didn't help that EVE Online launched about this time.

Basically, the combat achievement and kill oriented types largely abandoned the game over the course of the next year. However, the non-combat types were having the time of their lives. They were building player event cities, holding tournaments, running interplanetary mining operations, crafting unique items (every item had its own unique stats, they weren't all just copies of the same +42 End/+36 [insert main stat here] gear) and so on.

So having reduced your player base to a particular crowd of people largely interested in sandbox, RP, crafting and player driven content, what's the obvious design decision to make?

Why, to introduce (bad) FPS mechanics, make all gear equivalent, force players into pre-defined classes and basically destroy the non-combat part of the game, of course!

Basically taking everything your remaining player base loved out and (badly) trying to break new ground in the diametric opposite direction. It'd be like WoW saying "There's too much focus on polish and casual game play here. Let's turn the game into the most hardcore of Korean grinder MMOs, delete all quest markers, make it full loot open PVP, and introduce a metric where if you don't grind at least 20 quests per day, you lose XP. And let's keep the quality control testing to a minimum for this one. A few game-breaking bugs won't hurt, and we certainly wouldn't want it to get out that we were making these changes before they went live."

That's an NGE. I feel reasonably confident no other company will ever be that stupid again. But hey, no one saw Sony pulling that move in the first place, so who knows?