"It's now a shoot'em-up game for adolescents, not at all conducive to our play style," says Carolyn Hocke, a web technician for Saint Michael's Hospital in Wisconsin, whose character A'thena was mayor of an in-game city on Tatooine and owner of a bustling shopping mall. "People who we grew to know over the last couple of years are gone. Cities are ghost towns, guilds are gone. My galaxy is gone, my game is gone."

The changes to Star Wars Galaxies, developed by Sony Online Entertainment, are aimed at bringing in new players and keeping them around to pay the $15-a-month gameplay fee. To this end, the so-called New Game Enhancements, or NGE, abandon much of the complexity of the original design, which let players choose from more than 30 different professions, then carve out an economic niche for themselves in the Star Wars universe.