Newsflash: John Smedley, president of SOE, admits that there are problems with SWG and that they’re losing customers because of a fuck up on their part. In a bold move, Smedhead and his dev team actually communicated with the remnant of the player base on the official forums this weekend (with a massive 12 pages of posts). Amongst the choicier tidbits is the news that they’ve temporarily canned the next planned expansion pack while they work on eliminating bugs from the game and addressing many of the playability and content issues.

From Smed himself:

The truth is the community morale won’t improve until the game does. Communication can’t fix this. Improvements to the game can. The fact is our communication has improved.. people don’t neccessarily like the message is all. I get that. So do our community folks. My preference is that all the posts in the gameplay forum are discussing gameplay balance.. and in-game issues.. but they won’t until we get the game to a baseline fun level. We’re not there yet. We know that. We’re working to fix it. There is no other answer.

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The SWG community has been voting with it’s feet since the NGE came about. Either we end up being right about our ability to turn the ship around and make a game that’s BETTER than it was before, or we were wrong and we fail. Either way we were losing subs before the NGE and believe it or not, we are losing them at a slower rate than before. I’m not going to pretend we didn’t lose a bunch of subs from this. We did. And I don’t think the game is where it needs to be yet to aquire new subs. But it’s getting there with each and every publish.

At the end of the day there are a lot of people in this community that wonder why we did this? Why did we “deliberately” try and piss people off. Obviously that wasn’t our intent. This is a business and we needed to improve the results of the business. Did we make a mistake? Maybe.. but only time is going to tell on that one. One thing is certain. We made a mistake with how we presented it to the community, and for that I’m sorry.

I still think it was a needed thing though. It’s not as simple as “you should have just fixed the things we were complaining about”. That doesn’t address the very real fact that what we had was a hardcore game that wasn’t going to attract the mass audience that the Star Wars IP brings to the table.

Now I could go on and rave about how we’ve heard this all before but the posts (collated into readable format by my good friend Talon over on our PA site here) are filled with such honesty and humility that it would be unfair of me and I wouldn’t like to get a reputation for kicking a man while he’s down. (Well, okay, I don’t care that much because sometimes it’s fun!)

It makes me feel all warm and tingly.