Posts with tag StarWarsGalaxies

I know what you're thinking over there. You don't care about Star Wars Galaxies. Maybe you played it for a while, caught up in the release hype -- or maybe you were too smart to get caught up in the hype in the first place. But either way, it's hard to see how SWG has many subscribers these days -- though they obviously have at least enough to keep the game running. However, despite the game's flaws, its recent implementation of a player-run Galactic Senate is an interesting idea. The senate is comprised of 32 players, nominated by the player-base, but selected, in the end, by Sony Online Entertainment's community team, so it's not a completely democratic process.

And what can a senator do? They get to vote on "legislation" proposed by the SOE community team and can "request a redress of issues by the development team." Very nice -- and an interesting implementation of direct player interaction with the development team. In World of Warcraft, I suppose the system does work similarly -- enough reasonable player complaints on on the forums will get the attention of the CMs who will be able to bring up issues with the developers. And with SOE selecting the senators, they may have no more overall influence than our own forum posters.

Slashdot is linking this morning to an article that BBC has posted today which gathers views from several game developers as they talk about what comes next when you have a behemoth such as the World of Warcraft dominating the MMO-verse. While somewhat light on new perspectives, it's just further showing that developers really do have to account for WoW when considering their existing and future software offerings.

Though the article talks with people behind Star Wars Galaxies, Lord of the Rings Online, and the upcoming Age of Conan, I find that Slashdot commenter JanusFury sums it up best with, "Instead of complaining about the lack of a strong competitor to WoW, how about making one?"

What's on your MMO horizon as a WoW-killer? Does anything coming up, or existing on the market now, have a powerful enough hook to pull you away from the World of Warcraft? Obviously, if you look at the included image, you know what I'm waiting for.

[via Slashdot]

Joystiq reports on an interview with Sony Online Entertainment's head honcho John Smedley, in which he enlightens us as to SOE's team spirit:

One thing that I love about our company is that there is no "quit" in this company. It's about making sure that we have pride in what we do. People within the company feel so much pride in this game that they want it to beat the crap out of World of Warcraft.

Unfortunately, SWG's new changes don't seem to be going down well with the community, and with only 250,000 recorded subscribers, we wonder quite which world this guy is living in. WoW subscribers can breathe easily, unless Sony have some dark magic up their sleeves.