The only exposure I've had to Star Wars Galaxies, besides the awesome Fett's Vette video by Windspire, was via an old roommate, who was gone most of the day but would leave his mining bot on. Knowing that he was doing this, and that no one stopped him, and that many other people were probably doing it too...just sort of soured me to the whole proposition.

One benefit of WoW having such a massive market share is that they can afford to ban cheaters en masse, and overall I think Blizzard does a decent job of policing.

So this account of the rise and fall of SWG is fascinating to me. It's written in the style of a what-have-we-learned postmortem, outlining what SOE did right and wrong in dealing with the fans. It sounds like the developers are behaving in the same way as Lucas himself; taking something everyone loved just the way it was, and poncing it all up in the name of...what, exactly?

In Lucas' case, I think it was simple brattiness. In the case of SOE, their reasons for the total redesign that's going down right now are put forth in this statement from Nancy MacIntyre, the game's senior director, to the New York Times. Hit that jump.

We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base. There was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an opportunity to be a part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves. [emphasis mine]

"Kill, get treasure, repeat." A more depressing summation of the games industry has never been issued. This sameness, and the conscious recognition by big developers that they are seeking more of it, is deeply discouraging to my jaded, freshness-cravin' self. Eliza "Progress Quest" Gauger

Read entire article here [HenryJenkins.org, thanks Seesar]