Naoki Yoshida recent interview

[Nektulos-Tuor]

It's your word versus people who were intimately involved in the product, but no, I never played it, I can only relay what people say. However, the bold part is important, because that is the number 1 sign an MMO is in death throes. The reason Yoshida pulled it off is that he shut down the game and basically launched a completely new one. He didn't change it in flight.

What happened in a nutshell in a good example, was they took FFXIV: A Realm Reborn and revamped it to what it used to be instead of the other way around. Then made all items worthless and reset levels. Legendary and really cool weapons people had, spent years to get were invalidated completely. They went from 800k-1.1million subs to 400-500k in a day after that update which was REALLY good back then. It also didn't help that World of Warcraft was also starting to become popular, so they all left and moved to a better game.

Yes, it did start to drop off when they added Jedi in patch 6.2(I think?)-9.0, however that is because the game itself lacked end game content. It also wasn't getting any because instead of adding new content to the game they decided to CHANGE the game completely.

What made Starwars Galaxies such a good game was its re-playability, sandboxness. The updates and every update they added to the game made it worse and worse, removing sandbox features from the game.

Imagine if they fired Yoshida and brought back the old devs and turned it back into what FFXIV used to be. That is essentially what happened to SWG.

[Delily]

Imagine if they fired Yoshida and brought back the old devs and turned it back into what FFXIV used to be. That is essentially what happened to SWG.

That analogy is helpful, thank you for the explanation. One thing I notice is the focus on the sandbox elements. I know many people tend to think a sandbox MMO will revitalize the genre, but there have been quite a few attempts at a sandbox MMO, and only Eve is around. I think sandbox work very well for single player games like the ES series, and for smaller network games like Minecraft, but once you scale them up to MMO levels, the things that make then enticing in small environments become detriments, many because you have too many people fighting over sand and knocking over other people's castles.

[SQBoard]

They went from 800k-1.1million subs to 400-500k in a day after that update which was REALLY good back then.

Those are curious numbers...don't suppose you can link me.

The closest i can find is SWG peaked a little over 400k subs and settled to 200k range and kept losing even before WoW or CU/NGE.

Everquest was referenced to be around 500k at the time which was a success. As far as i could tell, million subs was unheard of until WoW when the expectation of mmo success was reset.

[Fendred]

That analogy is helpful, thank you for the explanation. One thing I notice is the focus on the sandbox elements. I know many people tend to think a sandbox MMO will revitalize the genre, but there have been quite a few attempts at a sandbox MMO, and only Eve is around. I think sandbox work very well for single player games like the ES series, and for smaller network games like Minecraft, but once you scale them up to MMO levels, the things that make then enticing in small environments become detriments, many because you have too many people fighting over sand and knocking over other people's castles.

I think there is a lot to learn from sandbox MMORPGs because they focus very heavily on the sociological aspect of the gameplay. Sandbox MMOs try to create challenges that can only be tackled by large numbers of players working together. The FFXIV hunts system is a simple example of this kind of thinking. The only thing from World of Warcraft's history that matches this kind of mentality was the opening of the gates to Ahn'qiraj. To get to the next raid, the entire server had to pitch together in order to open the gates permanently. This meant players of all stripes needed to contribute supplies to the effort, culminating in a major server event. It was a one time thing, but very memorable. I remember running around in Silithus as a naked gnome with a cape distracting people as they were trying to fight stuff. I was kind of an asshole back then.