So it’s baseball playoff time, and I’m enjoying a game on TV when I get an email. It’s from SOE. They want to make sure that I know they are closing about half of their SWG servers. Yeah, OK, I know that. And they want me to know a couple other things. To quote;
In accordance with the server closure date, the Free Character Transfer service has been extended through October 15. 2009. Between September 15, 2009 and October 15, 2009 at 4:59 PM PT all characters on the affected servers are eligible for a one way, one time Free Character Transfer* to any of the remaining thirteen (13) Star Wars Galaxies servers.
Cool! Free character transfers! That’s always good, especially when the server you are on may be one of the soon-to-be-obsolete variety. Duh. But there is more;
After October 15, 2009 at 5:00 PM PT, any characters and their associated items and structures remaining on the identified servers being closed will no longer be accessible on your Star Wars Galaxies or Station Access account.
Ouch. OK, no longer accessible? You mean deleted, right?
But wait! There’s more! And this is the really good part!
To access the Free Character Transfer Service, you must login to Star Wars Galaxies with the character you would like to transfer. You will be notified that your character qualifies for the free character transfer service opportunity when you login. Eligible characters may also enter “/freects” to begin the transfer process. Only one character may be transferred at a time. Please read and respond carefully to each question and answer entry you type. All Character Transfers are considered final and cannot be reversed.
This means that there is no way to transfer your characters if you are currently unsubscribed. I say currently because the nature of MMO subscriptions is that people come and go, then come back again. Tarkheena and I have resubbed to SWG three separate times.
So let’s do some fact inventory, shall we?
- Many of us have enjoyed repeated returns to the SWG for visits from time to time. During AGDC we even talked about this game in particular having that kind of draw.
- The servers, the way they were, were completely untenable. You could scarcely find another player, even in most of the cities.
- They are offering free transfers. Whoopty-freaking-do. Of course they are. Who in their right mind would PAY for a transfer. This brings us to the fourth point.
- This program was designed to MAKE YOU RESUBSCRIBE if you want to change and preserve your character. This is horrible customer service, and by extension, business.
- SWG is an abject failure. I don’t think anyone involved with it pictured it working out this way.
- SOE is not a customer-friendly company.
Here’s what chaps my hide: This was another opportunity for SOE to engender goodwill. Instead they have taken a short-term attempt to grab a few extra dollars in callous disregard for their past and future customers. The players and fans of this game have been jerked around more than the subscribers to just about any other game I can think of. CU, NGE, all of that stuff has been well documented. There have been discussions here and elsewhere in the past about making it as easy as possible for customers to return to your game (and thus your income line) in every case. I’ve abandoned games because of resubscription policies before, and this is another case where the publisher has tried to exploit people’s feelings toward their customers to callously take a month of subscription money in exchange for an opportunity to preserve those characters just in case you might want to come back at some future date. Yet here once again, SOE didn’t think things all the way through.
All they had to do was one of two things;
- Make character transfers available through the web site, whether or not you were currently subscribed.
- If the above wasn’t technically viable, offer a week-long “return to archive your stuff” free access period where people could come back, pack up their houses, and move to their new server homes. Who knows? Maybe a few of us would get nostalgic and take out the credit card one last time.
That doesn’t look like it’s going to happen now. So I guess it’s goodbye SWG for me and Tark. It makes me sad, but it doesn’t surprise me.
I told my nine year-old daughter, who sat on my lap for a lot of SWG gaming, what Sony was doing, and she said “Oh my god, it’s Order 66.” I couldn’t have said it any better. One last “@&$* you” from Sony…I’m sorry to say that I’m not surprised.
[...] Genda re: SWG – “Instead they have taken a short-term attempt to grab a few extra dollars in callous disregard for their past and future customers.” [...]
I don’t care if they delete my characters since I will absolutely never be tempted to play the NGE ever again. They would have to pay ME to log into my account.
Wouldn’t it be ironic, though, if after they deleted a bunch of veteran’s characters they roll back the servers? I know it would never happen, but seeing how far they are willing to go to screw over their players nothing would surprise me anymore.
Yes, its would have been nice of Sony to offer a “Welcome Back Weekend” but maybe they decided they rather get paid then to give something away for free. If players on the soon to be closed servers really care about their characters they will resub and move them and if not its their lost.
I do not believe Sony is the evil company you are making them out to be over their handling of SWG, remember its just a game.
It is just a game…but many of us spent a lot of our real life time and effort playing this game. It hurts when it is treated so callously and with such disregard. Many gamers are in a lull right now…we are a bit bored with WoW now and I am sure that many, like me, are considering looking back at some of our old games. I had been considering looking back at EQ and as Genda said, we were just talking about how great the crafting was in SWG a few weeks ago at AGDC. In addition, talk about a great opportunity to capitalize…Millions of us wanted to try to get into the Knights beta, but were disappointed. If I were in marketing at Sony, I would be using that as a chance to try to get people back. “Hey…miss the Star Wars universe?…Come play for a free weekend and take advantage of a free character transfer to help consolidate the servers”. What a wasted opportunity.
@Hambone- I didn’t say they were evil. I implied that they are clueless, disconnected from their users, and might be stupid.
There’s a big difference.
For the record, some people who I consider to be my friends work for SOE. When I say “they” it’s management I’m taking a shot at here.
WoW, you are right, this is awful.
SOE is in many regards an awful company. I do not speak of the quality of their products, but this is not the first /facepalm moment I had with SOE decisions how to do things in the most annoying way to piss off customers.
Really, they have a long tradition of being like that.
[...] Online Entertainment, on the other hand, basically just gave former players the finger. Instead of taking a cue from successful MMO’s and offer free time to encourage former [...]
Actually deleting customer characters? That is crossing a line for SOE. It is like they are just throwing in the towel.
But then again, I predicted that Lucas would only sanction a single Star Wars MMO and that when TOR showed up, SWG would be put out to pasture.
So this could be a bad customer service moment for SOE or an admission that all of the characters are going to be gone soon enough anyway, so why go out of the way to save those on lapsed accounts.
Maybe.
And tbh, once server transfers started, everyone knew those servers would be shutting down at some point. I know that SOE offered at least one free come-back month in Feb, when I took use of it, transferring a toon off of Valcyn, AFTER I chose an NGE prof. I am pretty sure but too lazy to look it up, that they offered another free come back month since then. I myself, missed the chance to transfer another toon on a different (currently paid) account from Valcyn to elsewhere. Why? I misremembered the date. Anyone complaining about this never had any intention on coming back to begin with. That’s my read. At some point, I will (probably) pay to move Skoot to a new server. For now, I don’t have any driving need to move him. He can wait. You can choose to complain about a game you don’t pay to support not supporting moves from a server you haven’t played on in awhile. Or you could have taken notice of this when it happened and taken the action required then. At $15. Or you could choose to be a SOE hate fan.
Anyone who didn’t take the free month back w/ a free toon transfer in Feb has only themselves to blame. Again, as soon as FCTS was announced, anyone who was thinking or reading forums would have realized the old server was going to be shut down. That the timeline was unannounced sucks, but it was obvious it would come along. Play w/ the rules you are given, not the ones you hope will come along at no cost to you.
@Redheadedtim – Your argument misses the point, and to be honest it’s kinda asinine.
“You shoulda known” is fine for laws and common sense. But in a case where I’m not playing a game, I am sure as hell not reading the forums or a lot of news about it. If a company EVER wants me to return to a game, they had better not depend on me keeping up on the forums, or thinking about the game. They probably SHOULD make it so that the emotional triggers (i.e. my characters) are there to motivate and incent me to come back. Maybe at some future date, I’ll watch a Star Wars movie, get nostalgic for the game, and resub. But not if my characters aren’t there.
The point here isn’t whether or not I’ll ever play “Skoot” again. The point is that this is bad business, and it shows the disconnect from the player base that you and SOE management share.
It’s that same elitist, player-discounting, and condescension that epitomizes SOE’s attitude, and has alienated hundreds of thousands of customers over time.
For the record, I AM playing with the rules that have been given. Those rules don’t include me giving SOE my money again for SWG any time soon, because they clearly don’t want it.
This also makes it much less likely that I give them money for anything else, as their contempt for customer service and the player base precludes me from doing so. Not to mention that they have just demonstrated that it’s risky for me to get emotionally involved with my characters on their servers, because there’s no promise that if I miss an email or two, they will still be there.
And that is what makes it a Bad Business Decision.
@genda if you missed SOE offering free months back and you missed a full month’s of notice that they were shutting down servers, then it IS you fault for not moving your toons in time. TBH, you weren’t ever planning on resubbing or replaying again, so SOE is not missing your money or your loyalty because you never would have given it. You have not chosen to take a part in the free time back and free toon transfers offered duing that. They miss nothing from losing you because you were lost long ago. I won’t say that SWG is perfect nor is SOE perfect. But they’ve offered free time back. The first free time back mentioned “escape from your Galaxy”. AKA transfer now while you still can. Let’s be honest. Don’t choose to complain about something you never honestly considered rejoining. That’s my big problem w/ NGE/CU complainers. I’m tired of you. It’s been years. Move on or shut up. Choose one. You received emails regarding your account if it was not current. I did. That’s how I moved my pre-cu toon to a new server. it would be nice if they offered free transfers to non-current accounts but chances are, after years of free “come back” times, and a year of “free come back and transfer” times, those accounts are not coming back. Time to move on. Give those who pay a chance to move if needed, and feathers to the rest. They had their chance. SWTOR’s out soon, the FreeRealms version of SWTOR will be out before long. They did what they had to for their “customers” (those who are actually paying or willing to pay). Also, your argument, is kind of asinine.
I am with Genda on this, SOE in the past has never deleted player characters. That has been beyond the pale for them up until this very point.
I may be wrong on the absolute nature of my statement, they may have deleted very low level EQ characters (under level 10?) that had not been played for a very long duration during some EQ server merges, but that was a something of a special case and didn’t axe whole accounts worth of characters that might be viable. Nobody ever lost, for example, their level 40 druid due to a server consolidation, no matter how long their account lapsed.
I have my own theory on the why, but the mere fact that they are contemplating it seems to herald a change of view at SOE. They have depended a lot on people coming back after a long hiatus as revenue method. To chop that off seems foolish and to say “Missed your chance, you lose!” seems very out of character from SOE’s past stance on characters.
They should (my opinion) shovel unclaimed characters over a certain level onto the remaining servers, or they would do that (again my opinion) if there were a long term plan for SWG.
[...] Gut, soweit nichts schlimmes, das passiert, SWG hat ja nun schon ein paar Jahre auf dem Buckel. Das Problem an der Sache, wenn man den Chartransfer auslässt ist der Char nach einer gewissen Zeit …, und den Transfer kann man nur vollziehen wenn man ein aktives Abo hat. Kann man seinen ehemaligen [...]
Oof! Yeah, this was a bit of nonsense by SOE, though they are known for keeping games going long beyond their shelf life (Matrix Online?) and making odd decisions about gameplay and logistics. I do hope some recourse can be had.
On another note entirely, at least YOU have baseball playoffs to watch. I’m a Cubs fan, which should tell you A)why I’m able to be so upbeat all the time after years of futility and B)why I facepalm about the impending Yankees – Phillies possible matchup.
I’m surprised S.O.E. would go so far to make you log in to transfer. I don’t remember it being anything like that with the Everquest transfers when they merged. They really should hold onto those characters that are not logged in.
After what SOE did to Vanguard, they will never get my money ever again. SOE has ruined EQ, EQ2,SWG and Vanguard….all games I enjoyed at one time. They have no regard for their customers, management appears to be all about the bottom line and pushing their own agendas for”the next big thing”. I haven’t really been playing an MMO for over a year now. I’ve messed around with WoW but it just doesn’t keep me interested for more than a few weeks at a time. The only game out there that I would actually like to play is Vanguard, even tho it is on life support……
But I won’t give those bastards at SOE any more of my money…….
Sorry but I have to agree with some of the others on this one. If you aren’t paying a sub then you aren’t a customer, just a former customer. I doubt any major expansions can happen with SWGs since the agreement for TOR was announced so I would also say that it is a dieing game in the fact that it most likely won’t see anything major happen.
Hopefully this is part of a reorganization by SOE since they need it. I wouldn’t mind playing several of their games if they lowered their sub costs or made them F2P but have some pay bits inside the game.
Times are tough economically and have been bad for them for a while, maybe this is the herald of some major change? Who knows, but value the memories of the good times you had, not a character made up of so much code.
My wife and I took up EQ2 and had almost forgiven and forgotten everything we hated about SOE in the past. I enjoyed the game up until the point I realized I had pretty much gotten bored with the whole Fantasy Genre.
I went to Planetside for awhile, and enjoyed it up until the point I realized that SOE’s understaffed GM’s (or downright incompetent, you chose) allowed hackers to run rampant for as much as 6 hours at a time on the weekend.
Then I come to my favorite blog and read this… I can’t say I’m suprised. SOE has definatly shown a disconnect from it’s customers. It kinda destroyed any desire I had to play EQ2 again.
But, in the spirit of fairness, we don’t know how much hardware space these characters are taking up. For all we know (in these tough times), the few subs they are recieving (especially in light of a new Star Wars MMO in the future that is bound to make their playerbase shrink at least temperarely) may not be enough to justify the maintenence of the database. This may be not be the “grab a few bucks” technique that it appears to be; it may be nothing more than a logical decision to keep the company healthy. Sony as a corporation has definatly had a rough couple years, so this does not suprise me. But… it still does not help it from a PR standpoint.
However, even if my theory is correct, I cannot justify giving them any more money at this point. I can forgive mistakes as everybody makes them. As long as a company can demonstrate to me they have learned from their mistakes they can regain my trust. But SOE has yet to demonstrate to me they’ve learned from their mistakes. Such a pity too, as they have some serious talent working for them.
[...] Because people loved that so much when Star Wars Galaxies pulled that trick last year. [...]