Why did the NGE happen?

[EVILoHOMER]

I don't understand it, even after all these years... it just makes no sense to me. How did all these people in charge thing it was good? I refuse to believe focus testing turned out results of people saying it was amazing, unless they never saw a game in their whole life lol. People don't get into the industry to make shit games, so how did no one see the problem and think to stop it? Surely there wasn't that much pressure to launch something so broken? It would have been easy to shown any Human why it sucked. Did George Lucas say it was amazing? then I'd understand lol... otherwise I just don't get it.

After Luclin/PoP expansions and all the other poorly made and rushed expansions throughout the years of Everquest. After Everquest 2 turning out to be a massive failure due to so many things, then CC and BRS for Planetside and even the failure of UO's horrible UI and lack of content. I just cannot blame L.A for it like if say it was made by Valve or a developer with their track record.

I can see how mistakes happen, then you revert back to how the servers were prior to the patch. I don't get how they happen and they're as bad as the NGE and I don't get how they happen and never get reverted back. Even Blizzard refuses to give classic servers... what is so hard about doing this? I mean I can play Vanilla WoW on all sorts of private servers and there is no problem and they do it for next to no money...

[damijin]

I don't understand it, even after all these years... it just makes no sense to me.

Raph Koster talked about it on his blog from time to time, and a few other MMO folks have chimed in. Generally speaking, the consensus is that SWG was not reaching the numbers they had hoped for. From the mindset of people involved, this was Everquest (very popular in that pre-WoW era) and Star Wars (the hottest IP on the planet), and I think they really expected it to just blow EQs numbers out of the water and be this super huge smash success (like WoW ended up being).

In those crucial months they made some poor calculations thinking that they needed to really revamp the game to bring players in, but as we all know, they simply alienated their existing players even more.

When you talk to people involved with the project there always seems to be this deep feeling of regret. That they wish it had worked out better, and I feel like some of them will avoid working with a big IP like Star Wars for the rest of their careers if they can.

[p0intman]

From what I've read and who I've talked to, I can only blame Lucas Arts.

Edit: To be clear, I also blame Smed. I've got different reasons for that, mostly that through the entire thing he had seemed genuinely uninterested in doing anything but kissing GL's ass.

That and some of the developers that were hired to that team were fucked up and actually hurt the game even more.