Open Letters to SOE: Thank You for SWG

Dear Sony Online Entertainment,

I'm writing you today to thank you for the greatest MMO ever created due to its open-ended sandbox gameplay and accessibility, Star Wars Galaxies. In SWG I am able to be any class, race or mixture of skills that I want to be. It is the textbook example of how to make a game for people who want to have fun in an online universe. Your community aspects, housing and crafting system are second to none. Truly some of the most inventive and creative game scripting to date. I can go out and place massive machines that farm resources for me, as long as I take care of them. I can place machines that massively reproduce prototypes of goods I make, as long as I keep them supplied. I can have a literal online business in this massive game world you created for fans to enjoy.

I'll never forget the good times I had with my friends walking around as a bounty hunter Wookiee who kept blowing up his pants from tanking too many Banthas. So much so that a friend of mine carried a spare pair in her backpack, just in case. We had hours of fun taking missions and running around killing things, the kind of fun we have been unable to replicate in any other game.

As far as the accessibility, well, you have completely outdone yourself. You've made a system where everything can be accessed either by the keyboard or the mouse. You can queue up macros to do complicated procedures, saving me strength on days I'm too tired to push buttons repeatedly due to my disability. Everything in your GUI can be adjusted to my liking. I can put anything anywhere and change the sizes of anything so that I can easily see them. Since I don't need sounds, it doesn't matter if I'm Deaf. I wish there was a website that would score your accessibility, if there was, I'm sure it would be the only MMO to ever receive all 10s.

Thank you for creating place that I can retreat to after a hard day for the rest of my life.

Sincerely,

Steve Spohn

Disabled Gamer

December 11, 2003

Dear SOE,

I’m writing you today about your incredibly amazing MMO, SWG. I'm not a big fan of some of the updates you're doing, but I love your product. As previously mentioned in other letters I have sent you, this is the best game I've ever found with the greatest accessibility I've ever seen. Please be careful with your updates. This new Combat Upgrade has taken some of the fun out of the game for many of my friends, but I still continue to keep them from canceling. This is a good game and I know you'll do the right thing.

Attached is my previous letter explaining why I believe this is the best MMO ever created from the standpoint of the disabled gamer. Thank you for listening.

Your loyal fan,

Steve Spohn

Disabled Gamer

May 1, 2005

Dear Sony,

I'm writing you today concerning your latest decision to implement the NGE or New Game Enhancement. Why are you changing such a wonderful game into a hybrid first-person shooter? This doesn't make any sense. SWG was once the most accessible game I've ever played. I've brought friends from other games to this game just because of how wonderful the environment was. Now you have completely locked me out of playing the game I love by taking it from a kind of game I can play using the mouse to something I would need to use both the keyboard and the mouse.

You've taken away the crafting system and all the players are leaving. I can’t convince any of my friends to stay, even if I could play, which I can't. When I contacted a “red” on the forums posting saying that I'm disabled and that the NGE would make the game so that I wouldn't be able to play your representative responded, “We cannot stop a multimillion dollar upgrade because of a small segment of the population. This is for the best.”

Really? I fought for this game and spent quite a bit of money on your company, but disabled gamers are only a small portion of the population? This is for the best for who? No one wants this upgrade and your employee just said they don't care if disabled people can't play! Why would you take a game that you established as an MMO RPG and turn it into a shooter?

Angrily,

Steve Spohn

Proud Disabled Gamer

November 15, 2005

Dear John Smedley and other SOE executives,

I'm writing you today because I wanted to say “Hahahaha.” Your fans told you the NGE was a mistake, but you said “rolling it back would be impossible because it cost too much money to upgrade and that would be a waste.” Well, congratulations, now you won't be getting any money. Not even from the less than 1000 people who stuck around after your ridiculous upgrade.

I'm glad your servers are shutting down on December 15, 2011. It's about time. Are you happy now? You managed to take an extremely successful game with over hundreds of thousands of subscribers to the point where you need to shut it down because you can't get enough suckers to waste money on your horrible decisions.

I found this quote by Smedley absolutely hilarious, “We've learned a thing or two with our experiences with the NGE and don't plan on repeating mistakes from the past and not listening to the players.” You hit the nail on the head there, buddy. Good job on ignoring those subscribers who wanted to give you their money. Let me rephrase that. They wanted desperately wanted to give you their money for the product they originally bought before you started doing your precious upgrades. You tried to reach for bigger numbers and you failed. Now the game failed.

Congratulations on killing what was the most accessible game in videogame history for massively multiplayer online games. I hope you know by now when people talk about upgrading things in other games developers have been known to say things like “we won't pull an NGE” and “the game industry learned its lesson from SOE about changing games” because making a MMORPG into a MMO FPS RPG was the worst move any publisher ever made to a game that was already established.

You abandoned your core player base. You abandoned the disabled community. And you wouldn't listen to the fans begging you not to do the NGE. You were wrong.

Good riddance,

Steve Spohn

Editor-In-Chief of AbleGamers.com

June 24, 2011