Yoda Bends Luke Over

I do get tired of picking on Sony. It’s very similar to messing with a not-so-bright bully in elementary school; easy to do, hard to resist, ultimately, not very satisfying. On the other hand, if not for Sony’s almost-weekly missteps, I wouldn’t have much material right now … since the new MMOGs are taking 4fe.

Sony is just so damn fucking EVIL, someone has to joust their windmill. Fortunately, I have better eyesight than Don Quixote.

Today, Sony patched Publish 10 – The Path of the Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies, the long awaited revamp of the Jedi unlock system. After reading through the corporate PR post of why this is good for all of us!, I’ve decided a more accurate title would have been “The Path of the Skullfuck”, subtitle: We’ve Been Skullfucking You for Months, What’s One More?

(Disclaimer: I have no desire or intent – and never have – to grind through professions, levels or quests to obtain a jedi character. If one was handed to me or if I could pay a few REAL LIFE bucks to get one, then wtf, give me a jedi. Otherwise, shove it up your ass sideways.)

Many players don’t feel this way and rabidly want a jedi character. That shouldn’t surprise anyone … apparently that was news to the original SWG dev team, however.

History lesson for SWG noobs … the original system to obtain a jedi character was completely unknown — no clues, no official word, nothing. SOE tells the playerbase to just enjoy the game, jedi will come to you during ordinary play, even for the casual player.

Later, we all learned this wasn’t quite true. Jedi was coded to trigger after mastering five professions (out of a total 32 possible professions). Months pass, and still no jedi. What … a … shock, no player happened to randomly hit on the required five, and honestly, why in the world would anyone? Did they think the attention-deficit crowd would make a good showing in opening up the jedi characters?

The player grumbling gets louder, so Sony introduces “holocrons”, these little glowing cubes that tell the player what profession he/she/it needs to master. Besides the problem that these holocrons only drop off of high-level mobs so non-combat players have no chance in fucking hell of ever seeing one, the holocrons will only tell the player four of the five needed professions; you have to guess the last one. (Sheer evil genius)

Jedi start popping out of the proverbial woodwork. Sony then (as we found out today although had long suspected) secretly recodes the system so that eight professions are required, four of which are not foretold by the holocrons. The odds are freaking astronomically against you that you could accurately guess the eight professions without error. I doubt there was even one person that did; I never heard of anyone that ever did — not even a rumor of a rumor of a someone.

No matter, the catass crowd reacted as they usually do … by grinding out all 32 professions. Problem solved.

Fast forward to today. SOE explains that they had indeed changed the system long ago to require eight professions instead of five (thank you sir, may I have another?), and the new jedi system is now quest-based (no surprise) and, ahem, gated. (SURPRISE!!!) In other words, you can’t begin the path to jedi until enough of the players ahead of you on the path have passed through the quest system.

(Or something like that. Who the fuck knows since the usual SOE bullshit is to not explain anything fully … or else we’d really get pissed.)

I managed to dodge this skullfuck, mostly by remaining disinterested and avoiding content. Come to think of it, that’s the only tried and true method I’ve found to keep SOE’s dick at bay … content avoidance.

I highly recommend it.