The wife, friends and SWG (no surprise there!)

Well the big, and unwanted, surprise today was the wife going for her routine midwife appointment, only to get referred to the hospital for 24 hours observation for high blood pressure. Unfortunately the fact that this has started so early on could spell trouble in the long run - time to put our trust in the medical professionals I guess. I spent some time with Mrs. Rid tonight, needless to say she'd rather be at home (but wasn't complaining about the not going to work bit!).

As I mentioned in an earlier post (I think) Thursday is usually 'sad old gits come round to mine to play Warhammer or Role Play' night however with Xmas fast on the way Phil has to work (he's in retail) and Darren has to pick his wife up from an antenatal class (god we are getting old!) so I called it off this week (just as well too what with my aforementioned hospital business). I swear we are never going to get this D&D adventure done (and they are only level 1 for crying out loud!).

Not much else is new, still fearing next Tuesday when the SWG NGE supposedly goes live (I hope they cancel but I doubt they will). The official forums are still 99% complaints (and with good reason) and it appears SOE can only make things worse. I know you're probably bored sick of all this SWG stuff, I expect come the end of next week it'll all be done and dusted (one way or another) and I'll start ranting about speed cameras instead (ask anyone who knows me!).

Tiggs the community relations person is no longer working for SOE (did she fall or was she pushed?) http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=communityrelations&message.id=15830

SOE have announced that [at some unspecified point in the future] everyone will get 2 character slots (presumably per server) to satisfy those people complaining that the players who unlocked Jedi in time (i.e. before the NGE) had an unfair advantage. Unfortunately this has simply angered the Jedi players who worked hard for that extra slot and will almost certainly kill off what little player economy the game has left once all the crafting professions are consolidated, decay is removed and pretty much all the content is combat based. This will be because everyone will probably use the second slot for a Trader mule character! Not to mention that fact that it simply encourages more people to create a Jedi character if their main character isn't already one (hell thats what I'd do!).

Finally it became apparent that yesterday everyone who didn't already have the Jump To Lightspeed (JTL) expansion got given it for free (because it would seem that the NGE requires JTL just to get through the tutorial) this has angered players who paid for the expansion (a little over a year ago now - I beta'd it while on my honeymoon believe it or not! Not all the time mind you....) personally I'm not bothered about this but I can understand why people are (especially in light of all the other issues going on with SWG right now). http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Announcements&message.id=751

Theres so many bad vibes over this NGE for multiple reasons how good it turns out to be is almost a moot point now.

Lots of people (on the SWG boards that is) linking to the following pages:

http://games.slashdot.org/games/05/11/10/1559208.shtml?tid=101&tid=209&tid=11
Which begs the question, why is the head of SOE taking questions on Slashdot but not even posting on his own forums?

Are these developers at a recent conference referring to the NGE?
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1468&Itemid=35

As an aside (for those still reading) I did log into SWG on Tuesday, despite having not played (seriously) for a while, it was fun (mainly because grouping with Bruce's Jedi was making things easy for me), I fear I will truly miss this game.....