Yep, SWG was indeed utterly fantastic. The amount of depth to it was unbelievably, they managed to get so much right with it at the start. But the key ingredient was the fact that it was a sandbox MMO. I fondly remember logging in for the first time, doing the tutorial, and then loading into the game world and having absolutely no clue what to do next. I was a Zabrak, and I ended up running outside of town and promptly getting murdered in the face by a really stupidly low-conned mob out there. After that I remember just standing around speechless because I didn't know where to go next. That initial steep learning curve, and the unforgiving environment that you were presented with, created one of the best MMO's out there. I loved the fact that other players could teach you skills if they knew them, that you couldn't speak every alien language unless you learned it, the sharnaff hunts every night outside Coronet, player housing, the huge player cities that you could build with a player being the actual mayor (and Politics being a skill tree all of it's very own), an economy that was dominated not by an auction house or marketplace, but by player-stocked vendors in the player-cities. The shifting resources that one day would be absolutely amazing in a single location, and then all of a sudden they could be terrible. Crafting items, experimenting on them, trying to squeeze out the absolute best stats that you could, and then creating a schematic from the prototype and loading that up into a factory with all your mats, to churn out hundreds of them over a few days. Relying on player characters to create power cells for these factories, and other players for so much else. Sometimes you'd travel far and wide just to get to a well-known vendor because they sent you an ingame mail to say that their latest batch of Vibroknuckler or whatever has amazing stats on it. Everyone had a purpose in SWG, and it was this that made it so great. MMO companies really do shoot themselves in the foot, because they create so much content for us in the latest incarnations of MMO's, but if they actually realised that player-created content is so much more varied and better. Everyday in SWG was different, because things were organised by the players.
Our Player Association (Guild) would constantly be doing all sorts of cool stuff in an evening. We'd be off holding off the Imperials in Bestine, or protecting Anchorhead from attacks of AT-ST's and other Imperials, or we'd head off for a bit of rancor hunting on Dathomir. We'd have meetings with our Rebel war council, and then organise a massive attack on an Imperial base that had just been put up that afternoon. Or I'd be out surveying the land for the latest resource shift on wheat that was needed to craft doctor buffs. I could spend an hour buffing rebels outside Coronet spaceport, flagged for PvP and refusing the buff Imperials because I chose to play my character that way. The list was quite literally endless. And it was all created by me and everyone else.
It was so lame of SOE, John Smedley in particular, to think that he knew better than those players, so much so that he felt the need to alter everything that was great about SWG and turn it into nothing useful at all. It's such a shame that nobody at SOE could hold their hand up and say that they'd made a mistake. If they'd have rolled back, or even provided a few servers as it was prior to the combat upgrade and later NGE that ruined SWG, I bet SWG would still be thriving right now. I for one know that I wouldn't have stopped playing it.
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) so when you saw someone with it on, you knew that someone had taken a lot of time and care to make that one suit of armour. 