SWG Rips Off WoW -- AgainFollow

My subscription to SWG ended in January 2006. After sampling D&D Online, I settled for a subscription to WoW. Well, my immediate reaction upon booting up that game was shock at how much of WoW's system was being ripped of by SOE -- right down to the skinny bar along the bottom of my screen that slowly fills up as I gain XP and move slowly toward the next level.

Well, now SOE has done it again. With their much-anticipated "Expertise Trees" system, they have copied WoW's Talent Trees. Compare....

SWG's Expertise tree for Jedi...
forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=DevDiscussion&message.id=51796
WoW's Talent Calculator tool, showing talent trees by profession...
www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/hunters/talents.html

If I were a power-that-be at Blizzard, I'd be going after SOE for copyright infringement.

Talent trees don't look like professions. Professions had 18 boxes and were all the exact same. Talent trees were all different and allow for specialization in a certain field. Expertise is definately a rip-off.

its not even close enough to be any where near copywright infringment, its squares on a ******* background!

its no more a copy than the talemt system was a copy of numoures things before it

ya, eq especialy ripped off wow.
and uo too.

there is a difference, WOW, is a popular game with a reasonably balanced system, SWG isnt. i dont think blizzard really could give a damn if SOE copied the talents system over, word for word, graphic for graphic, i really doubt that they have even stopped laughing at SOE since november 15.

SWG had that system or similar when it 1st came out 3 years ago.

So What if SOE ripped of WoW, 1st everyone complains that WoW is better SOE use a similarity and all of a sudden they are wrong?

Good on SOE for doing it, they are trying to provide what is best for their paying customers (its about time)

SWG was cutting edge once, why do they think that everything has to be level based in order for it to be understood or enjoyed. its so not true. introducing levels into SWG was the single worst move, closely followed by the fps hybrid system, that SOE could have possibly made.


i wish i could enjoy the system that we've been left with, but i can't and that really annoys me too.

Obviously, you have no idea what you are talking about when you say the pre-CU system was similar to this new Expertise system. What you have now differs RADICALLY from pre-CU.

First, as others have pointed out, the pre-CU system (as well as the CU system) was originally a mix-and-match system. Players could mix elements of any of the game's professions FREELY, so long as they had the skill points to do so. By contrast, this new system is very linear. And worse, it's a FLAWED linear system. You need look no further than the new Bounty Hunter tree for proof of that.

The official SWG forum is in an uproar again, because after all the rhetoric from the devs about reintroducing "diversity" into the mix for players, the players have already seen that they will be channeled once again into templates predetermined by the devs. A good example of that is the defensive bonuses BH's can receive for composite armor (assault armor). Why no trees for battle armor or recon armor? Is it because the devs want all bounty hunters to look like Boba Fett rather than Zam Wessell? Why no pistol certs? Is it because the devs wanted all BH's to emulate Boba Fett rather than Jango Fett?

These two flaws are glaring examples of the ineptitude of these devs.

The second radical difference between pre-CU and the current system is a difference that is at the very core of the game: the level-based damage multipliers. Before the Combat Upgrade went live, all the beasts and NPCs of the game had numeric ratings in the box you could bring up by the radial-menu "Examine" command. That "difficulty level" was almost irrelevant to everyone, with the exception of Creature Handlers, for whom it was the determinant of which creatures they could tame at a given level of expertise. But for combat purposes, everyone and everything played on a level playing field. Thunes and horned voritors could and frequently did kill even full-template characters in the pre-CU environment. When the CU went live, it ALL boiled down to a comparison of your level versus your target's level. Even an unarmored toon with a CDEF rifle could kill any target in a couple of shots, as long as he was a sufficient number of levels higher than his target.

This one change effectively ruined the gameplay value of ALL the pre-existing planets in the game, save for whichever planet happens to have the "right" mix of creatures of your level at a given time. WoW has a similar effect with it's multiplicity of "zones," which I still don't particularly like -- but at least they have plenty of zones with plenty of content for ALL the levels of players in their game. But for SOE to have shoehorned a level-based damage-multiplier system on top of a game originally designed to be a level playing field is just asinine.

The ONLY rationale I can see for the move was because "They did it in WoW...."

"So what if SOE rips off WoW?" Egad.... SWG was a totally different game than WoW, with totally different mechanics arising from a totally different approach to how the game should have been built in the first place. And now, trying to retroactively paste individual features from WoW on top of the original SWG is a never-ending parade of idiocy. THAT is why I care when SOE rips off WoW -- again. It's just another element adding to the ruination of a game I once greatly enjoyed.

Iakimo is 100 percent right

the trouble is, only the people who knew what the game was really like, will see it. i know there were complaints about people using templates, but those templates were fairly limited, a char with certain skills needed to defeat a jedi, would be equally vulnerable to another skill set, etc etc, there was no 1 template that was better than all the rest.

besides which not everyone was combat orientated, crafters and medics and entertainers of all varieties were necessary, truly necessary, not some afterthought consideration with a novelty factor.

anybody playing the game now will never know how truly deep this game used to be. no matter how much they try to gloss over things, a game that is flawed from the core, will remain flawed and no ammount of fixing or tweaking is going to change that.

I saw quite a bit of evolution on the templates, both pre- and post-CU. Up through the summer of 2004, the flavor-of-the-month seemed to be Doc/whatever, but gradually the defense stacker templates began to catch on. Definitely NOT about "who could heal better." I saw PLENTY of combat temps with Novice Medic take down doc-based templates.

But as for serious PvP (at least on the Bria server), the name of the game was always Combined Arms. Many a time, I saw well-coordinated Imperial groups composed of a mix of healers, melee, and ranged dominate whole battlefields.

OMGZORZ! Scrap the game! "Master"OfWar can't win a duel! NO FAIR!!!

How's it feel being such a glaring example of the sort of whiny nub that pushed the devs to tear down the original game and implement both the Combat "Upgrade" AND the NGE? Sleep well, Sunshine....

Here. Sounds eminently whiny to me. And ludicrous.

i wasnt whining, i was stating what was pretty much fact