This part of station access?Follow

LOTRO is published and developed by Turbine Entertainment; not SOE. It can't be part of Station Access.

Edited, Apr 13th 2007 11:46pm by Magi

And thats a good thing. :p SOE has a tendency to ***** up things.

Personally, i'm glad SOE isn't going to have anything to do with the game... Every game they get their hands on they seem to royally ***** up and mess around with. I remember reading people complaining about some of the other games Turbine put out with SOE, and I remember the endless complaining about some other SOE games like SWG (I forget if Turbine did that one or not) or some of the changes in EQ2 like changing the char creation and crafting system.

Besides that, SOE doesn't have the best track record with getting bugs fixed... like in EQ2 I remember people talking about a change in the combat system, that was basically game-breaking, and they left it in for 2 or 3 months. Didn't roll-back to a more stable system or anything, just left players hanging for 2ish months.

Now, that isn't to say I have anything against players of those games, saying they aren't fun, or are bad games. Just saying that from my experience SOE doesn't have the best track record with games and major changes in one form or another.

Edit: Yea, everyone does make some changes that mess up their MMO's, but SOE is the king of it imo. I mean look at what they did to SWG. The changed EVERYTHING when many things didn't need to be changed. How about the combat system change in EQ2? Or the crafting system change with dumbing it down to an insanely easy level?

Edited, Apr 13th 2007 9:49pm by Tomec

Well, in all fairness, originally Vanguard wasn't part of SOE... the lead designer on it and SOE had a falling out over changes in either EQ or EQ2, I forget which one. However, the private company founded by the guy (or whatever it is) couldn't keep the money up and had to sell to SOE to keep the game alive and host the servers and such. Now, of course, once it got to SOE's hands it became their fault, but originally it wouldn't have been that way...

Yea, like I said once SOE got their hands on it... Although I truthfully don't know how much promise it actually held because of how the MMO industry has changed away from the forced grouping and multiple hour long travel times between two cities. Like it or not, the MMO industry has changed (thanks to WoW mainly, but the changes were in the works before WoW came out) from what it was back when EQ was out... and the devs of Vanguard are/were still designing games for that era.

That isn't to say that every MMO has to be "ezmode" like WoW, and have short travel times and such, but the players of MMOs have evolved and "grown up" more now. More and more want to be able to NOT have to make the game basically a second life (no pun intended) and be able to actually have a life outside of the game.

Well, i've truthfully not seen any SOE launches in-person... not even an expansion. So, I really only know about what what people have said... and even then I was never interested in Vanguard, so I didn't really bother reading anything about the release. I did read a little about the EoF release for EQ2, but I had long since quit the game by then so I didn't hunt that much.

In short, i'll take your word for it

Yeah, NGE severely annoyed a lot of SWG players. I haven't really played it much myself since NGE hit (although other factors affected that, too). The few times I have logged on since NGE, I haven't found it as comfortable to play, and they ditched the one part of the game that made it far more flexible than any other MMO I've played which was the professions "onions", because they thought it was too complex for players to understand.


Although I've not played MxO since beta, I'm not sure how different things are, but SOE also changed the combat system on that when they took over from the original publishers.


With EQ 2, one week before go-live, they changed the Heroic Oportunities mechanism to require an "empty" skill to be used to trigger an HO because "it wasn't working in parties" since healers were breaking HOs to keep a party alive. This was great for parties, since it meant they could heal and HO, but lousy for people like me who like to solo, as the cooldown timer on the HO ability was too long.

Heaven forbid they change the actual HO mechanism to not break HOs on healing spells... no, they couldn't possibly make work a mechanism that Square Enix had managed in FFXI a couple of years earlier, or likely other companies in other games, too; they had to slow down the soloers even further because they hadn't accounted for the fact that a party's healer might actually need to heal someone when the tanks and DDers wanted to put out some mega damage.

SOE doesn't own Vanguard, or develop it. You can tell because Sigil is the only entity claiming copyright:



SOE publishes and distributes the game, runs the servers and does billing. After Brad McQuaid's problems with SOE someone else mentioned above he's not about to relinquish creative control. Sigil pushed the game out early because they ran out of money, he said himself that it was Sigil's decision, you can see the post on their site. Anything you hear to the contrary is tinfoil hat conspiracy theory.

Not that I'm a fan of SOE, I just like facts to enter into disparaging remarks about people. I actually also think SOE changes it's games too much, and it always seems to be for the worse. I no longer play their games because of the way they destroyed crafting as anything other than a sideline timesink.

As for SWG, it was needlessly complicated. This is Star Wars, for pete's sake, how could it miss? It should have been the biggest MMO ever, but they borked the game with an unfathomable design. The only reason it got as many players as it did is purely based on Star Wars. If it was Frapdoogle Galaxies it would have been dead after a month. Instead of trying to simplify the game it had, they should have made SWG2. If someone with half a brain actually does make another Star Wars MMO, it will be huge.