Ignorance Not An Excuse

October 15th has come and gone, and with it came the closure of twelve Star Wars Galaxies servers, as I reported this past September. Now, I originally assumed that once the servers shut down, all characters left on them would be lost for good. The reason for the server closures was that the already running free transfer service had been such a success that multiple servers were now dead as players flooded their characters to other, more populated, servers.

I say this a lot, outside of MMO Fallout, but the general level of ignorance in many players astounds me. Following the server closure and ending of the free transfer program, the latest brand of complaints against Sony has cropped up: Complaining about the cost to transfer. Rather than simply delete characters on the closed servers, Sony decided to keep that information just in case anyone missed the transfer. We can probably assume that this process is done by hand, because Sony is now charging for post-closure transfers: $50.

$50 may seem like a steep price, but I did a little more investigation into this free transfer service and found that, although some players complained about lack of notification, that was absolutely not the case. Sony originally started the free transfer service back in January 2009, that from the start looked to extend all the way to October 15th. That gives a ten month window of opportunity for players to move their characters. In September, all players whose email addresses were in Sony’s database were sent notifications of the upcoming server closures. That email was sent again six days before the closure.

I, personally, have not had a subscription to Star Wars Galaxies since 2005, however I still received both email notifications. I did not, however, transfer my characters because I have no intention on going back to Star Wars Galaxies. For a player to ignore the ten month open window, the numerous reminders, and the free veteran weeks, it shows that they either had no intention on ever returning, or they simply didn’t check their email. In the first case, the player has no ground to stand on, as their complaint boils down to “I didn’t want to eat the lunch meat, and now it’s expired and I’m mad because I have to throw it out and pay for new meat.” You saw the opportunity, ignored it, and now it’s too late. In the latter case, that is just blatant ignorance, which brings me to the title of this article: Ignorance is Not an Excuse. The players in this group are akin to the millions of Americans who didn’t pay attention to the warnings, delay, and more warnings as to the digital television transition that took place this past June. Television campaigns ran for months, yet still a couple million had no idea why their TV went blank on June 12th.

And I know that some people are going to refute what I say, claiming that they only received six days notice: No, you just ignored the other notices. As I’ve already said, I haven’t played Star Wars Galaxies in close to five years, yet I received the notices. I have to agree with Miagisan on the MMORPG forums, who said:

People who have 0 interest playing seem to be the first ones who complain about the current developement cause they enjoy carrying a torch even though they will never touch the game again.

Star Wars Galaxies may be a much smaller form of its past self, but those who play it today are in much higher spirits than you might think. Most of the complaints are drawn by “vets” who stopped playing a long time ago, but can’t resist the urge to take a baseball bat upwards of Sony’s collective head whenever they so much as cough in Star Wars Galaxies’ direction.

When I say