Venture

As some dead white guy once said:

Opposing view on SWG and the "NGE":

From what I was told by someone who worked on the game (the late Jeff "Dundee" Freeman), the game was bleeding users. Projections showed they were some months away from reaching a number of subscribers low enough to contractually return the rights to LucasArts. They had to do something drastic to prevent that, and the NGE was it. NGE cost them a lot of users at once, and it probably wasn't the best (never mind only) possible response, but it did let them keep the license until TOR rolled around. Thereby allowing another company to take what should have been a license to print money and blow it.

I have no idea what game the pre-NGE fluffers were playing but it wasn't any version of SWG I logged in to. Combat was a joke, the economy was even worse, the crafting system was a grind from hell (every player I knew who was into crafting except one quit as soon as they got their grandmaster rank; they didn't even want to think about touching the game again), the "non-combat" professions like "entertainer" were complete disasters.... I was out of the game before the NGE arrived (and it literally nerfed my character out of existence; he was a Creature Handler/Ranger type) but it is hard to believe the replacement systems could possibly have been any worse.

SOE is not the devil, and if they got their hands on City it would not necessarily be a complete disaster. Of course it probably wouldn't be all rainbows and kittens, either, but it's hard for me to see a scenario in which a SOE-run City would be worse than no City at all.

Sadly, my best arcs are still KIA due to the filter. Maybe I should knuckle under and try to fix them for the end.

Thanks to the whole MA community. Good times, bad times, it was all worth it.

I am in the process of taking my Beast/Nature MM to Villain so she can get the Leviathan APP. It seemed the best fit. Fortunately Black Scorpion's arc doesn't make you do anything really reprehensible. She'll rapidly head back to Hero...I intend to finish the character.

Just to rub salt in the wound, my desktop's HD was dying (judging from the noise it was making during drive activity) so I installed a new one. Now the system won't even POST and I can't figure out why. I'll have another stab at it in the morning but it just sucks not being able to log in now.

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I've been switching back and forth between City and CO for ages. Guess CO will pick up the slack.

Wildstar looked interesting but like a lot of people, I will never spend money on a NCSoft product again. They've lost a customer.

TSW looks interesting but it won't run on my machine. Tried it during open beta, no go.

I was thinking of going back to WoW at least for a month or two when Pandaria launched. Perhaps WoW will get the suddenly-available money in my gaming budget.

Warts and all I'm sorry to see it go. I'd hoped to see it improve and go on.

11/30, eh...got a Beast/Nature MM to finish, and then a lot of archiving to do, I guess....

I have the badge on two characters and will probably get it on at least one more.

They should lower the recharge significantly and make the workbench available on the market. The badge is its own reward; getting something that (now) normally costs money would be an additional incentive. That purchasers would not get the badge defeats any objections from those who earned it instead.

Starship Troopers can't have a reboot because there's never been a Starship Troopers movie.

Nope.

Never happened.

Uh-uh.

Personally I liked the original movie. I particularly liked the makeup job that let Rondo Hatton play the bad guy one more time, 45 years after his death.

The movie's box off take probably wasn't helped by the fact that Terminator 2 came out five days after it did.

I re-rolled the Beast/TA MM I'd just made (and gotten to 27) as Beast/Nature. I'm a bit ambivalent about it; TA was good for stopping runners and Nature's got nothing in that department. But I have enough TA characters already.

Costume recipes aren't worth anything as drops. They sell for spare change at the AH. I delete them when I get them to make room for more valuable stuff. There's no earthly reason for them to even exist at this point, let alone to add them to the AE menu. They should just unlock the pieces for everyone and remove the recipes.