Some time ago, I wrote here at Terra Nova that MMOGs really don't get a "do-over", that later changes to the game almost necessarily sit on top of old mechanics, that design is cumulative.

The live management team for Star Wars: Galaxies set out to prove me wrong with their "combat upgrade" and "Jedi revamp" a while back, and I watched with some interest. I couldn't see how they planned to change the rest of the game at the same time as the combat upgrade, given how tight the interdependencies of the game were. In fact, I predicted on the official SWG forum forum that any serious attempt to realize the ambitions of the combat revamp was going to take a major rethinking of the entire profession system and crafting along with it.

I was closer to the mark than I would have guessed: the live management team recently and with breathtaking suddenness announced and then pushed to live a massive overhaul of the entire game, the so-called "New Game Enhancement" or NGE. Unfortunately, the live management team seems to have ignored another long-standing criticism of SWG by many observers: that their design and implementation process is a disastrous mess. Never more so than with the NGE: whatever it is conceptually, in practice, it's roughly on par with an alpha build of a MMOG.