Welcome to the 33rd edition of Reloading…



We added 300ish new faces to the Reloading community over the weekend.   I’m not sure how many new recruits joined after my call to arms in the last column since the staff don’t let me delve into that information.  They are sneaky that way.  I’ll find out and give you a progress report.   To everyone signed up for this mailing list, a big Thank You!

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“By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.” – Robert Frost



Being a boss isn’t easy.  Ask John Smedley…



I expect that some columns will generate a response from the community, but even after 17 years in the game industry I still have those surprise moments when I hit on a topic that our community has such an investment in.   Most recently that topic was Star Wars Galaxies.



SOE Fan Faire was this weekend, and despite a Planetside 2 reveal and new expansions for EverQuest and EverQuest 2, the most-discussed topic continues to be the SWG shutdown announcement.

“Let me start off with thanking you for a nice article that doesn't make all loyal, fighting SWGplayers out to be nuts with no real life… It seems that bad news and drama are the only things that are consistently reported. It would be nice for people to see that most of the players that are fighting to persuade SWG to covert to F2P are mature, articulate adults that not only gamers, but have careers, families and real lives.” – Stephanie

The MMOG community has always been thought of as a group that dresses up in play armour and chases each other around a basement with foam swords.   Now to be fair, some of the community do just that and on an even grander scale forming groups of medieval cos-players that take over fair grounds, have rules and even a hierarchy within the group that allows some of the individuals to attain titles like Knight.    The truth is that a very small fraction of our community fits that stereotype.

“The game has so much potential and offers players a myriad of things to do in game.  Despite what others may think, the game was NOT dying.  As Mr. Smedly said himself, the subscriptions were steady and we in game, saw an influx of new players from other games or some veterans who were returning to the game.  We believe that both games could have co-existed.  Many of us were planning on playing both games. “ – Christina

In an interview with Massively, John Smedley, the president of SOE had this response when questioned if players could influence the decision to shut down the game.

“At this point, unfortunately, this is just the way it is happening. We still have a partnership with LucasArts around Clone Wars Adventures. And there's another Star Wars MMO entering the market, and I think it's going to be terrific. It's going to fill a large hole, and we're certainly happy to see Star Wars players be taken care of and get into a game that's going to be great.”

The contract for Star Wars Galaxies runs out in 2012.   The question is, who really wanted this game dead?  Is SOE concerned that with the launch of The Old Republic that SWG will fade away anyway?  Is LucasArts concerned that a failure caused by TOR might affect the perception of Star Wars in the public eye?    Did Bioware cut a deal that included the shutdown of SWG when their game launched?   We will probably never know. 



The TenTonHammer.com community is discussing the issue in this forum thread.   



What would you do if your MMOG was in the same predicament as Star Wars Galaxies?



Send me your thoughts. As always, you can contact me a number of ways:

• Email
• Twitter
• Telepathy (Just make sure it’s during business hours.  I hate to be woken by this stuff)

Until we meet again,

John “Boomjack” Hoskin