Star Wars Galaxies Developer Commits Suicide
Star Wars Galaxies Developer Commits Suicide
October 3, 2008
A controversial former member of the Star Wars Galaxies development team has taken his own life, reports The Escapist.
Jeff Freeman, 39, was widely - and unjustly - blamed by fans of the Star Wars-themed MMO for a failed 2005 update:
He was unfortunate enough to become the public face of the "New Game Enhancements" update, one of the most infamous debacles in MMOG history... even though his role in its development was minor.
Despite the fact that he continued to suffer online abuse at the hands of Star Wars Galaxies players unhappy with the NGE changes even after leaving Sony Online Entertainment in late 2006, Freeman's brother clarified that his suicide had nothing to do with the game. "I want everyone to know that it was not SWG that led him to take his life," he said. "He has been troubled for some time. There were a lot of personal issues that tore at him."
A memorial service for Freeman was held yesterday in Austin.
Crispy Gamer has more on Jeff Freeman. "Crying Freeman," a terrific 2007 story piece from The Escapist, details how he came to be blamed for the New Game Enhancements controversy.
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Posted 11/08/09 at 09:02am
DarkSaber: http://tinyurl.com/yez7jyo
DarkSaber: http://tinyurl.com/yez7jyo
Posted 11/08/09 at 09:01am
DarkSaber: Oh for gods sake, the Gearbox pres is gobbing off about Valve again
DarkSaber: Oh for gods sake, the Gearbox pres is gobbing off about Valve again
Posted 11/08/09 at 08:53am
JDKJ: But cheer up, Austin. If the unemployment rate continues to double-digit as predicted for the next few years, your half-dozen stands a better than likely chance of returning to power.
JDKJ: But cheer up, Austin. If the unemployment rate continues to double-digit as predicted for the next few years, your half-dozen stands a better than likely chance of returning to power.
Posted 11/08/09 at 08:46am
JDKJ: @DS: If he had added the line about "or hiring illegals aliens under the table to work as nannies," it would have been a completely perfect descripition. And, yes, it's about the same difference between a six and a half-dozen.
JDKJ: @DS: If he had added the line about "or hiring illegals aliens under the table to work as nannies," it would have been a completely perfect descripition. And, yes, it's about the same difference between a six and a half-dozen.
Posted 11/08/09 at 08:31am
DarkSaber: My god, that description makes them sound almost Republican. Still what did you expect, Obama is only marginally more left than republicans.
DarkSaber: My god, that description makes them sound almost Republican. Still what did you expect, Obama is only marginally more left than republicans.
Posted 11/08/09 at 01:07am
Austin_Lewis: Health insurance, brought to you by the same kind of bureacrats who couldn't, in timely fashion, investigate the comments of any of the men Obama appointed Czars. Or their past. Or their history of not paying taxes.
Austin_Lewis: Health insurance, brought to you by the same kind of bureacrats who couldn't, in timely fashion, investigate the comments of any of the men Obama appointed Czars. Or their past. Or their history of not paying taxes.
Posted 11/08/09 at 01:06am
Austin_Lewis: Yes, and what a piece of crap it was. Arresting and fining people just because they don't make a personal choice to buy healh insurance, creating over a hundred new bureacracies, and worse.
Austin_Lewis: Yes, and what a piece of crap it was. Arresting and fining people just because they don't make a personal choice to buy healh insurance, creating over a hundred new bureacracies, and worse.
Posted 11/08/09 at 12:24am
ZippyDSMlee: JDKJ:the only trouble is a bunch of witless hacks wrote it....its going to be a train wreck....
ZippyDSMlee: JDKJ:the only trouble is a bunch of witless hacks wrote it....its going to be a train wreck....
Posted 11/07/09 at 11:33pm
JDKJ: BREAKING: In a photo-finish at the wire, House passes health care reform bill. Relatedly, in a fit of pique, Austin Lewis kicks innocent dog.
JDKJ: BREAKING: In a photo-finish at the wire, House passes health care reform bill. Relatedly, in a fit of pique, Austin Lewis kicks innocent dog.
Posted 11/07/09 at 04:27pm
ZippyDSMlee: man I got alot of junk and dup files too >< god I need orginization...and no not the knee capping media mafia kind :P
ZippyDSMlee: man I got alot of junk and dup files too >< god I need orginization...and no not the knee capping media mafia kind :P
Posted 11/07/09 at 04:26pm
ZippyDSMlee: replaced :P
ZippyDSMlee: replaced :P
Posted 11/07/09 at 04:23pm
ZippyDSMlee: beemoh:hey its like 60GB porn,400GB anime 100GB games and crap I have took from all my DVDs, I hate waiting on dvds to install stuff..... oh and 40GB of my porn was in the found.000 folder...mostly corrupted.... least I got names of wut needs to be repa
ZippyDSMlee: beemoh:hey its like 60GB porn,400GB anime 100GB games and crap I have took from all my DVDs, I hate waiting on dvds to install stuff..... oh and 40GB of my porn was in the found.000 folder...mostly corrupted.... least I got names of wut needs to be repa
Posted 11/07/09 at 04:18pm
beemoh: @Zip: ...and you'd have to spend all that time re-downloading that porn?
beemoh: @Zip: ...and you'd have to spend all that time re-downloading that porn?
Posted 11/07/09 at 03:34pm
ZippyDSMlee: ggrrrrr......vista lost one of my hard drives and I had a heart attack thinking I lost 1TB of data....
ZippyDSMlee: ggrrrrr......vista lost one of my hard drives and I had a heart attack thinking I lost 1TB of data....
Posted 11/07/09 at 10:58am
JDKJ: Which could be explained by both (a) and (b).
JDKJ: Which could be explained by both (a) and (b).
Posted 11/07/09 at 10:56am
Austin_Lewis: JDKJ: You forgot C) the fact that, for some reason, every time he did something that would suggest he shouldn't be in the military, let alone an officer, higher ups ignored it or let it slide.
Austin_Lewis: JDKJ: You forgot C) the fact that, for some reason, every time he did something that would suggest he shouldn't be in the military, let alone an officer, higher ups ignored it or let it slide.
Posted 11/07/09 at 10:51am
JDKJ: Part of the problem is, I believe, that (a) the Army had a lot of time and money already invested in him and which they were unwilling to simply write-off and (b) an increasing need for the type of skills and services he provided.
JDKJ: Part of the problem is, I believe, that (a) the Army had a lot of time and money already invested in him and which they were unwilling to simply write-off and (b) an increasing need for the type of skills and services he provided.
Posted 11/07/09 at 10:48am
JDKJ: And that even if he was begging not to get cut loose, he was apparently a real good candidate for being cut loose, anyway.
JDKJ: And that even if he was begging not to get cut loose, he was apparently a real good candidate for being cut loose, anyway.
Posted 11/07/09 at 10:11am
JDKJ: @chada: And while Kennedy once noted that there's usually more than enough blame for everyone to get a slice, the possibility that the Army was unwilling to cut loose someone who was asking to get cut loose could be a factor.
JDKJ: @chada: And while Kennedy once noted that there's usually more than enough blame for everyone to get a slice, the possibility that the Army was unwilling to cut loose someone who was asking to get cut loose could be a factor.
Posted 11/07/09 at 10:07am
ZippyDSMlee: *noms on his feet*..nomnomnomnom*droooll* ...wuuutttttt uuu looking at?
ZippyDSMlee: *noms on his feet*..nomnomnomnom*droooll* ...wuuutttttt uuu looking at?
Copyright © 2007 ECA. All rights reserved.
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Game Politics and Game Politics logo are trademarks of the ECA.
Comments
oh lord, that's truly fucked up. and i want to get into video game dev, that scares me a lot!
Jesus Jack Jones Thompson.... is dead... (funeral udruge, followed by Celebrate :D )
I also think it's pretty scary that overly fanatic players kept harassing a developer because they think it's their game being ruined but the article states pretty clearly that his suicide had nothing to do with his job as a game developer.
Fanatic MMORPG players are 10x more whiny and over the line then most other fanatics XD
Not as much as PVP players!
That combined with fanatic sci-fi fans that worship said universe to the point where they give out death threats to an author that killed off a character in a book because the creator of said universe wanted it done..........You do have to admit theres a small percentage of the geek/nerd world that has no life + socially stunted + obsession = metal issues.
They get too many piercings?
Well, coming from someone that played the original, GOOD, SWG, I can honestly say that the hatred and rage directed towards SOE and anybody who works with them is well founded. Plainly stated: the NGE ruined what was and still is the best MMO I've ever played, to this day.
I, personally, wish with every bone in my body that SOE goes under because of what they did to it. Granted, its an unrealistic request, but whatever. This guy became the public face of a company that was going directly against the wishes of 70% of it's fan-base, of course you are going to get harrassed and raged at. If I in that position, I would have seen that coming from a mile away and gotten my ass out of dodge.
Apparently, however, he had more issues than just the game, and it really is a shame that anyone kill themselves.
"Well, coming from someone that played the original, GOOD, SWG, I can honestly say that the hatred and rage directed towards SOE and anybody who works with them is well founded. Plainly stated: the NGE ruined what was and still is the best MMO I've ever played, to this day."
I find your lack of taste disturbing...
Did anyone else notice the horrible, horrible irony of The Escapist reporting a suicide?
For anyone who hasn't played SWG let me tell you, before NGE the game was impossibly hard.
Before World of Warcraft came out and when Everquest took over the mmo theme everyone tried to copy and use Everquest as a basic formula on how to create an MMO. Thus the impossible MMOs let's take forever to do anything model came up and that was SWG.
It literally took hours, days, weeks and months and sometimes years just to advance a little.
And it was also supported by a small fringe of the gaming community who we shall call, the elitists who like to play a hard game and believe everything should be hard and it should take months to do anything. Take a party of six to kill a rat take 12 hours to kill a boss. (Think of another MMO that uses the Everquest Formula, FFXI)
Regardless of the NGE, the game was doomed. They tried to make it more like World of Warcraft and in many ways they improved the game and added an actual main story. Problem was that, it's glitched and its support staff were outsourced meaning if you fell in a glitchy hole, you might as well make anew character.
To become a Jedi it literally took people MONTHS and YEARS to do that. People blame NGE for people leaving, no blame WoW. Besides the only people who stayed were and complained about leaving where the elitists.
In fact most evened up joining WoW and they are the ones now complaining that they are lowering the EXP requirements, always whining about making a game easier.
You know what, gamers like that deserve there own MMO, how bout a dungeon or torcher game were it takes them literally days just to advance in the next couple areas and torcher for anyone else to play!
I do my fair share of complaining, but those people are freakin' scary.
Are you sure you were even playing the same game?
The game far from "impossibly hard" as you put it. You could change your character's skill tree's and master them in 3 days or less if you wished. Also you could kill almost anything solo, unless it was a theme park, event, etc... In fact out of any MMO that I have played I could get the most done in SWG as a casual player that I could do anywhere else.
The NGE didn't fail because it was bugged. It failed because gameplay was dramatically changed trying to emulate another game, while losing almost everything that set it apart in the first place; and also going against 70% of their player base. The bugs were the icing on the cake.
With that said I don't don't place all the blame on SOE, LucasArts deserves more than their share of blame. However SOE could have put forth more effort into designing something appealing, and retaining what they had that worked. The focus should have been taken off of changing the base game, to trying to rework other features, such as the GCW (Galactic Civil War), smuggling, bounty hunting, Jedi system, etc...
Jedi should have taken as long as they did pre-NGE. They were a symbol showing that you put forth the time and effort to do so. Why shouldn't those people be rewarded? Not to mention opening that up from the start as the NGE did would go against Star Wars canon.
Too the average lover of the Everquest formula, hard is not fighting for 12 hours in a boss battle or spending the first month killing rats and rabbits which might take a party of four to defeat one wererabbit.
Star Wars Galaxies was doomed before the change. The only people it upset where the hardcore fanbase of the EQ formula. Everyone else was looking at better sights with World of Warcraft.
SWG, FFXI, Matrix Online, Everquest 2 and many others tried to stay with the old forumla and some even though they were right before WoW they refused to change.
Now FFXI, they made it more solo friendly and changed some of the core gameplay I think they would have an increased membership. Fact is, they don't want to add things every month like World of Warcraft. They want to keep releasing expansions but honestly all those games you see listed, in there exansions how much content have they released?
Fact is, each WoW expansion it releases huge amount of content and honestly one patch of WoW ususally adds more content then each one of these games so called expansions. The only thing that keeps these games long is the impossible game play think FFXI and there 24 hourboss battles.
Even though these games dont have much members they still claim some that your membership might not be there if you dont play for awhile. Bull, WoW turned that theory upside down and lets everyone keep there memberships!
May he rest in peace... There are many of us in the industry that have a lot on our shoulders, and I really hope many people wake up and realize we can't let life get us down like this. Yes, it is life, it sucks, but we have to accept that that is just how life is, and we have to focus on the good in our lives, even when there is little good, and expect the worst possible result in all cases and hope for the best, and then you will be happy no matter what the result is and okay if it is worst case...
Best wishes to his family... Things like this happen in this world unluckily.
Three words come to mind. "Holy," "fucking," and "shit." Do they come to anyone else's mind?
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I AM DOOMED TO HAUNT JACK THOMPSON'S DREAMS UNTIL HIS CRUSADE AGAINST VIDEO GAMES ENDS.
Sad stuff..
It's right though, he has nothing to do with the NGE yet he takes flack as well, when it was Smedley and Torres who were primarily responsible for turning an open-world economy-based MMO like SWG into a WoW clone.
Back when the NGE was released, I too was telling people not to verbally assault good developers like Rogue13 (SWG art dev + Polycount.com founder), but to take the complaints to the brains behind the NGE. But you know, the cool kids keep on shouting at anyone because it's "in" to do it, instead of doing what's right..
And that's why my SWG forum accounts remain closed forever. No one with any respect for honest people - or themselves - would stick with that pile of crap, much less STILL complain to said honest people about lead idiocy committed so very long ago..
bad graphic...
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http://www.tala-karincayagi.com
*facepalm*
YOU FAIL AT LIFE.
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I AM DOOMED TO HAUNT JACK THOMPSON'S DREAMS UNTIL HIS CRUSADE AGAINST VIDEO GAMES ENDS.
Delete this plz