Star Wars Galaxies: One Year Report
Moriendor, 2004-07-06

Sony Online Entertainment's Star Wars Galaxies celebrated its one year anniversary on June 26 of this year. What has become of this high profile MMORPG during the last year? Did we smack into asteroids left and right or did we smoothly cruise along the milky way? Read our report to find out...

Prologue

If you want a rough outline of what major additions and changes were made to Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) during the last twelve months, it is highly recommended that you check out the Year in Review article that was posted by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) at the official SWG site. As we said in our newsbit when we reported about the article, you naturally have to put those read-between-the-lines glasses on and take it all with a few heavy grains of salt as it has been written by the people who made the game. The official "Year in Review" does give an accurate account of events though and lets you quickly get an idea of the major milestones that have been achieved since launch.

The Not-So Phantom Menace
...about general gameplay & technical issues, and more...

If one thing is certain about MMORPGs, it's that they are never finished and never completely bug-free. In general, things tend to be really shaky at, around, and right after launch and SWG didn't make an exception to that rule.
Aside from no one being able to login on launch day because of the "surprisingly" (yes ... quoting officials here) high number of players trying to create their accounts, SWG has undoubtedly experienced quite a bumpy ride but there have also been improvements...

It should first of all be noted that SOE changed its update frequency fairly quickly after launch. After the first barrage of hotfixes -to address last minute beta bugs and early launch bugs- the development team decided to switch to a monthly (four to six weeks) update schedule. The monthly publishes were/are put on the Test Center server approximately two weeks before they go live. Publish #8 saw the introduction of mini-publishes which are usually two weeks apart.
The original decision of monthly publishes made sense since the first hotfixes often introduced new issues that required another hotfix and another etc. - On the other hand, it must be said that it could be (and still can be) extremely painful to wait four weeks and more for vital (and seemingly easy-to-fix) issues to get addressed that the development team has classified as "low priority" for some reason. The introduction of mini-publishes between the big monthly ones did little to alleviate that problem as fixes many players had hoped for were just not included in those.
This policy of push-live-now-worry-about-fixing-later was extremely noticeable before vehicles and player cities were released as those features were assigned top priority and it is to this date still obvious that SOE puts a greater emphasis on new content than on fixing existing issues with the game... some of which have been around for a long long time.
In fact, the monthly update schedule in the beginning and the skewed priority assignment led to exploits, dupes, and other game-breaking issues not being taken care of in a timely fashion. It goes without saying that especially the former two items did not exactly have a positive effect on SWG's player-driven economy (there are no NPC merchants at all).
It is sometimes very hard to understand the development team's categorization of high and low priority items. Players have been and will be required to bring up a lot of patience due to the fact that updates are few and far between.

So what exactly is SWG (still) suffering from?
Well, we could take a look at all 34 (including Jedi) professions in alphabetical order now and if I were to refer you to the last one, Weaponsmith, it would probably be on page 1337 ;) .
Seriously though, there are still tons of issues with the existing professions due to the fact that the publishes so far have mostly only included a revamp of one single profession (if that). We are at publish #9 now and not all publishes included profession revamps. Granted, not all professions may be in need of a full revamp but just a few substantial fixes and additions instead. - However, neither of both has happened yet for most of the professions out there.
We already identified one of the reasons for this above, i.e. SOE's focus on new content and it seems like the Jump to Lightspeed space expansion is the main culprit here.
It has become obvious in the past few months that designers who are responsible for certain professions are all tied up in developing the space expansion and thus have no time for the core game. How else can it be explained that Image Designer, a profession that is able to alter the appearance of characters, and one of the -if not the- least popular profession(s), has been revamped while other much more popular classes are going to have to wait for their turn until after the space expansion is released?
If you are not playing SWG yet or are pondering about resubscribing, I'd advise you to check out the official Profession Forums to get a general feel for the state of the profession you are interested in before making your decision about when to buy the game or whether to resubscribe. It may very well be worth waiting a few weeks or even months more.

Profession issues aside (there aren't really any major game-breaking bugs in any of the professions with the exception of Bounty Hunter maybe), there are still some nasty old bugs from the early days in the game.
For example, disappearing items (and even structures) that sometimes reappear after server restart the next day (and sometimes not... and just in case you were wondering if there was a typo involved -no- servers are still being restarted every single day, then being down from anywhere between 30 minutes and -this has luckily become more rare- up to three hours), creatures and vehicles auto-storing, a fairly buggy commodities system where items can get lost or vendors/bazaar terminals are just not working for prolonged periods of time. Those bugs are luckily not too common but should they still be around after such a long time? Certainly not - especially because lost items or structures can mean months of a player's work going to waste.

Finally, let's talk about every online gamer's worst enemy - the lag monster. I have just recently started a new toon on a low population Euro server where the in-game network monitor shows me pinging in at 60ms (for the technically challenged, the lower this value, the better - anything below 150ms = smooth - anything above 500ms = usually unplayable). Hmmm... then how come creatures sometimes spawn around me three to four seconds after I /dismount from my vehicle? Tricky, the lag monster is ;) .
Well, seriously, the lag can become a real issue on highly populated servers and even more so in highly populated areas on those servers. Since all planets are divided up into zones and different planets are being powered by different server clusters, it's hard to make a general statement about the lagginess though. I just know for certain that the beautiful planet of Dantooine which has supposedly received a hardware upgrade (a baby hamster? ;) ) is still nigh unbearably lagging on some of the higher population servers. Network performance overall is pretty good though. These two are basically the only issues that need to be addressed: The spawning system so it catches up faster with a player's position and hardware upgrades to make certain planets playable again because rubberbanding and warping is just plain unfun.

And what about the improvements? Well, client stability has definitely improved. Random crashes now occur rarely and most graphical issues have successfully been addressed.
The development team has also considerably reduced server downtimes. This statement is true for both, the daily server reboot and the publishes. While players had to deal with downtimes of up to nine hours in the beginning, monthly publishes are now pushed to live within about three hours on average. The daily maintenance downtime is usually less than one hour now but this shouldn't bother too many people anyway because it's happening in the middle of the night.

In summary, we must conclude that Star Wars Galaxies is still suffering from a plethora of annoying and -if I may add- unnecessary bugs. There are the minor bugs that only interfere with a smooth playing experience and that should have been addressed a long time ago. And then there are the game-breaking bugs like disappearing items and structures. It doesn't matter if these bugs are an extremely rare occurence. I don't want to have to log in and fear that it may finally have been my turn to be hit by one of those nasties. I want to log in and feel confident that nothing of that sort can or will happen.
Alternatively, it would be great if you could at least sit back, relax, and trust in the Customer Service department's abilities to reverse a critical issue.
Unfortunately, you can't. I can tell you from own experience and from many many player reports that Customer Service is not of great help and that's putting it mildly.
"We do not reimburse for...", "It is against our policy to...", "We were not able to confirm that error by checking our logs" etc. etc. etc.
What is really outrageous is that one and the same issue is dealt with differently at times. While player A may get reimbursement, player B may get one of the generic replies from above. This inconsistency in dealing with issues must be taken care of - fast.
However, if you are lucky and manage to sail around the major issues, there's little preventing a mostly flawless playing experience. It would be great though if SOE would take a break from their new content frenzy and dedicate some of their time to fixing the bugs that have been around for just too long.

The Clone Center Wars
...about combat in SWG...

Combat in MMORPGs can usually be divided up into two general categories. Player vs Environment (PvE) and Player vs Player (PvP) combat. Both have considerably changed since SWG's release so let's check them out separately.
Before we do that, let us remember that SWG has a pure skill-based advancement system. You have 250 skill points that you can invest in any professions you like. Once you have spent all 250 points there is no further advancement. This has led to players picking up combat profession combinations that give them the best bang for the points invested, a.k.a the "flavor-of-the-month" (FOTM) templates.

PvE
The first and most noticeable change as far as PvE combat is concerned, is the (almost) complete absence of Creature Handlers and pets in PvE today. SWG was once referred to as "Pet Wars" but those times have long passed ever since melee classes got buffed up and Creature Handler was "rebalanced". This is actually a good thing because players with three Rancors in tow was quite an unimmersive sight back in the days.

Instead, what you see today in SWG is "solo groups". The development team has succeeded in turning many single combat classes and combinations of combat classes into unstoppable killing machines. Teaming up or forming hunting groups is no longer necessary to kill even the highest end mobs (with the only exceptions being the recently added Corellian Corvette and Death Watch Bunker dungeons which can not be solo'd). Groups nowadays only form so players can get high level/high payout missions from the mission terminals as the mission difficulty scales with the group size. Players then proceed to finish these missions on their own. That's where the term "solo group" is coming from.

How did it come to that? Did the development team intend for players to be able to solo all content?

They certainly didn't. What happened is that buffs and armor got out of control. With the highest end resources, doctors can enhance a player's hit points by thousands of points for a duration of up to three and a half hours. Armorsmiths can make composite armor with base resists of 67%-80% which can then again be enhanced by Smugglers to a maximum of 90% resists.
Add foods and spices to that which offer a wide variety of useful enhancements (especially since the Chef profession revamp) and you will be unstoppable.
A fully buffed and armored player with good attack skills and approximately 3,000 hit points to all of his stats currently has no problems to solo mobs with hit points in the 300,000+ range. To make matters even worse, some of the high end mobs are bugged and don't use their full attack/defense potential. It's ridiculously easy to turn very high end mobs into corpses.

A combat rebalance (that was originally scheduled for March/April) is still in the works and should be out within the next couple of months. It will be very interesting to see a) what the development team is going to do exactly (communication has been more than lacking so far) and b) how this "rebalance" is going to be received by the player base.
Players have gotten used to the solo play. It has all been like described above since last fall. Sure... SWG is an MMORPG and teamplay needs to be reestablished but SOE will have to be very careful to avoid mass frustration. And while they are at it they should also take a look at the group loot system and maybe add an automatic loot order because the main reason players solo mobs is so they don't have to share.

All in all, PvE is seriously borked in SWG. It may be fun for new players to start out low and to then experience the "uber-ness" as they advance. It gets old really fast though because there's just no challenge in PvE. Even killing high end mobs does get boring after a while and good loot drops are a rare event. The call is on SOE now to bring the fun back with the combat rebalance but they need to be extra careful in this case.

PvP
This is probably one of the saddest topics in SWG. We already mentioned "flavor-of-the-month" (FOTM) templates above and while players do have a fairly large variety of choices in PvE, the choices for PvP templates have always been extremely limited and still are.

A short excursion: Characters in SWG have three main hit point bars - health, action and mind. Health and action can be healed, mind can't (OK, it can ... by Combat Medics but not really an option since they get massive wounds for performing mind heals).
Additionally, there is one single type of damage (stun) that can not be resisted very well by wearing armor (max resist is 45%) while all other types of damage that can be dealt by players can be resisted just like in PvE (see above ... 67% - 90%).

This would all not be an issue if every class had a) the ability to attack the unhealable mind pool and b) could deal stun damage.
Unfortunately, there is only one class that can do both (Rifleman). Then there is another class that can do massive mind damage to multiple targets at once (Combat Medic). You can master both professions with the 250 skill points available to you so it shouldn't be too hard to guess who dominates the PvP battlefields in SWG since months now.
However -except for very few, very hardcore PvP'ers- even players using this template have gotten bored of PvP now because all it has gotten down to is Combat Medics tossing high damage poisons back and forth until everyone -including themselves if there is a counterpart on the other side- is dead. Clone. Buff. Rinse, repeat.

It should be noted in all fairness that 1vs1 PvP can be fun depending on the classes involved but shouldn't SWG as a Star Wars MMORPG be all about the Galactic Civil War (GCW) between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire?
It sure enough isn't happening at this time. Enjoyable group PvP events and the GCW in general have basically been dead for many many months now due to this huge imbalance. Just like with PvE, it's the combat rebalance that is supposed to bring back the fun. We'll have to wait & see and hope for the best...

Return of the (million) Jedi
...bending continuity to the max...

Lucas' and SOE's goal with the Jedi class was once to make Jedi the ultimate achievement. Unlocking the force-sensitive character slot (FSCS) was supposed to be hard, a rare occurrence and mysterious in that it was supposed to be different for everyone so no one could come up with a guide how to unlock.
To be perfectly honest, the only mystery surrounding the FSCS is the question where all those principles went when it came to the implementation of the system.

Rewind to October 2003: SOE and Lucas were getting nervous that no one had unlocked their FSCS after over three months into the game. They decided to give players hints and added Holocrons to the game, shiny little cubes that could be used and gave hints about the path to Jedi. It took only a few days until it became obvious that unlocking the FSCS was just a matter of mastering professions. The Holocrons would tell players up to four professions and they had to find the remaining one(s) on their own.
Holo-grinding basically turned the game upside down. Players started dropping professions left and right, picked up professions they had no interest in, just to drop them again a couple of minutes after mastery to move on to the next profession. Guilds fell apart and player cities were abandoned as a majority of the players began to study the art of using the in-game macro tools (and illegal third party macro tools) to their fullest potential.

The first Jedi then started to appear in early November 2003 and holo-grinding picked up full speed after Christmas when Holocrons were given out as a free gift.
As more and more people unlocked their FSCS, it became obvious that the Jedi class didn't quite live up to its promise of being the highest end combat class. In fact, Jedi could fairly easily be defeated by regular combat professions. This led to the next step of making Jedi more accessible. The development team removed permadeath for Jedi and replaced it with a skill loss system. At around the same time, they announced a revamp of the Jedi system as they realized that holo-grinding was having seriously negative effects on the game. Holo-grinding was supposed to be replaced by a quest-based system and also Jedi advancement in itself was supposed to become more than just slaughtering millions of animals for XP.
It's funny how this announcement was received by the players. You would think that people would sit back, relax and wait for the implementation of the quest system.
The opposite happened. Even more people started holo-grinding as wild rumors about the future quests involving random spawns were being spread. In addition, the development team promised players compensation for mastered professions under the new system. The fear of starting at square one, not knowing about the first step to unlocking under the new system resulted in people grinding like no tomorrow in the last three or four months.

A preliminary end to unlocking was just established last week with the release of publish #9 (players unlocking between publish #9 and #10 will not be able to start playing their Jedi until publish #10 is live). Publish #9 included the long awaited revamp of the Jedi class and it seems like the changes were pretty well received by the Jedi community.

Publish #10 which is due out in a few weeks (probably late August), will then entirely do away with the holo-grind as a method to unlock Jedi. Instead, players will have to do a series of quest and will most likely gain force sensitivity on their main character. A second character can still be unlocked but players will have to take him/her through the quests again if they want to make that character Jedi instead of their main.
This is definitely a little bit unfair towards players who created their main character under the (until a couple of months ago correct) assumption that this character would never be able to become Jedi. Rumor has it though that SOE is still investigating ways to allow players to choose which character they want to become Jedi so not all hope is lost in that regard.

Now that we have examined the current status of the Jedi class and the system to becoming a Jedi, it's time to investigate the impact of Jedi on the game. It's quite obvious, actually. Only a minority of the players does not care about Jedi at all.
The SWG development team had no choice other than making the Jedi class more accessible and to make Jedi a fun class to play instead of sticking to the original goal and make Jedi the ultimate achievement. The original concept of keeping Jedi rare has terribly failed due to the fact that the holo-grind system made it way too simple for players to unlock their FSCS. Also, the risks of playing a Jedi character were mostly taken out of the game. Removal of permadeath and the inability to make player bounties (bounty hunters are theoretically supposed to keep the numbers of Jedi in check) working come to mind.

It really depends on the individual player whether you like these changes or not. Star Wars fans will be quick to cry foul play as the number of Jedi between Episode IV ("A New Hope") and Episode V ("The Empire Strikes Back") -the timeline SWG is set in- is supposed to be very limited.
More open-minded players will accept the fact that it is probably an impossible task for a development team to exclude players from a very desirable goal. It is a game after all.
SOE has obviously been given 'thumbs up' from LucasArts as far as throwing continuity out of the window is concerned. The game is currently taking a direction where elements from the original trilogy (Episodes IV-VI) are mixed with elements from the prequel trilogy (Episodes I-III) and from the Expanded Universe (Star Wars literature authorized by Lucas). It boils down to every single player's individual decision whether you can live with this conglomeration of Star Wars themes or not.

The Outcasts
...the few, the proud non-Jedi & non-combat players...

Only Bio-Engineers, Chefs and Droid Engineers have received substantial additions and fixes to their classes so far. The other crafting professions are mostly working as intended but haven't seen anything really new except for a few minor fixes and new loot drop schematics. The crafting system in SWG has been very robust from the beginning though. A few ugly bugs appear/reappear every once in a while but overall most crafters should be happy with what they got. Sure, someone who has been playing one of the non-revamped crafting professions since day one is probably going to suffer from extreme boredom by now and will -due to the current focus on Jedi, combat and the space expansion- have to wait for many more months until SOE addresses the profession. However, you can at least try out different crafting professions in SWG and aren't forced into a certain profession like with the combat professions to be successful.

Entertainers with the exception of Image Designers have also received pretty little attention so far. I have pretty much zero experience with entertaining so can't really comment on how umm.. entertaining it is but I know from "real" entertainers that they were seriously affected by AFK holo-grinders conquering the cantinas. While players used to tip entertainers for their services before the holo-grind started, entertainers lost that source of income when the cantinas were flooded by people whose Holocron had told them to master Dancer or Musician. If you are a "real" entertainer you are probably mostly interested in the social aspect of the profession though and I would guess that entertainers do have plenty of opportunities to socialize with others. Regarding new content, entertainers will most likely have to be just as patient as crafters since Jedi, combat and the space expansion are higher priority items.

Medics in SWG are suffering from the solo play as was outlined above when we took a look at PvE combat. There are barely any hunting groups so medics aren't really needed to tag along. The doctor profession has instead turned into the cash cow profession #1 since players always need buffs to be able to go on their solo tours. Medics as a support class in the traditional sense are pretty much non-existent in SWG at this time. This may change though as soon as the combat rebalance reinforces grouping.

Scouts and rangers have been rendered useless in a similar way. They used to be a welcome addition to groups because they could make camps for players to rest and heal. This is no longer required. Additionally, players had to use camps to call vehicles and pets. This is also no longer necessary. SOE was unable to fix auto-storing issues with pets and vehicles and thus decided to give players the ability to call pets and vehicles at any time and anywhere with a 15-30 second time delay. It is unlikely that any of this is going to dramatically change with the combat rebalance. I'm afraid, players who are into scout/ranger will need a lot of patience before they become useful again.

A New The Last Hope?
...the future of SWG...

After one year, players of SWG can still only cling to the hope that the development team is eventually going to address those issues and will finally maybe even get around to fixing the bugs that have been in since launch.
In fact, it seems like many players have given up hope for the ground-based game and are putting all of their hope into the upcoming space expansion.
It will definitely be very interesting to see how Lucas and SOE are going to deal with both. Is the ground-based game going to be neglected in favor of the space-based game? Will it just depend on the sales figures of the space expansion? Which aspect of the game is going to get priority? Will it take even longer for fixes and additions to happen with the space expansion out?
Those questions can not be answered at this time but it's obvious that SOE is already more than just struggling with the ground-based game. One can only hope for a dramatic change as soon as the space expansion is finished and as developers are reassigned to different tasks.

I'd like to conclude our one year report with a few recommendations depending on your relation to SWG.

If you haven't played the game until now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with joining right now. It will take you several months to explore the game and its current content.

Experienced online gamers should be able to enjoy themselves quickly and boredom should not become an issue until the space expansion is released (if it is released in October as currently scheduled).

People new to online gaming may find themselves struggling a little more though. If you are a casual gamer, it will take quite some time to really get started. This must mostly be attributed to the enormous amount of credits across all servers.
Money makes the world go 'round in SWG just as in real life and as a casual gamer it will take quite some time until you can afford things like weapons, armor, vehicles or harvesters.
SWG was once supposed to be a casual gamer friendly game.
This is still true as far as the skill-based advancement system is concerned. It will not take forever until you have used up all your 250 skill points. But the player-driven economy has definitely made this game a casual gamer's nightmare. You will want to use your limited playing time wisely to get somewhere.
Additionally, you can safely bury your dreams of becoming a Jedi if you are a casual gamer. Not only does it and will it (under the new system) take a long time to unlock force sensitivity but the Jedi class itself takes insane amounts of XP.

You quit SWG a while back and are considering a return to the game? Don't do it right now. Wait for the combat rebalance, the Galactic Civil War patch, the space expansion or even until after the space expansion (depending on your focus of interest). Not that much has changed in the recent months.
Only exception: If you have a Jedi character, you may want to check back in and see how playing a Jedi has changed with publish #9. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Finally, if you have been playing the game since launch then you're stuck in the "hope boat" as most people currently. However, I guess everyone has their own reasons for sticking around and you don't need me to tell you why you're still there ;) .
Still, if there's one thing hopes and accounts have in common it's an expiration date. It is high time SOE gets into gear and starts making players' hopes materialize.

Report Score: 60% *

SWG Status Report 1

SWG Status Report 2

* The report score does not reflect the general quality of the game as a whole, but is an indication of the progress the game has made since the last review or report. We take a more detailed look at the network status, content updates, and bug fixes for instance, rather than gauge how good or bad the game is. For a more detailed look at the general quality of the game, please read our initial review.