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Coming Soon: another giant Star Wars Galaxies trainwreck

Oh Sony, what won't you do to alienate your audience?

SOE is currently in the process of testing another massive overhaul to how Star Wars Galaxies works. There aren't exactly charts keeping track of all the different bits of drama that spawn from MMORPGs, so I don't have a definitive comparative list here, but I'm pretty sure no other MMORPG has come anywhere close to SWG as far as the number of sweeping updates that have done nothing but piss off the userbase in as many diverse ways humanly possible.

Yes, first there was the original notorious Combat Upgrade, that resulted in people leaving in droves. Then just a month or two ago there was a change to recalculate experience that resulted in even more people getting pissed and running off. And now, well, what they've got queued up now might just be a trainwreck of epic proportions.

I won't try and explain all the changes involved in this "New Game Enhancements" pack, because it's all a bit beyond me, but here's the hilight reel as gleaned from this thread:

• No more automated combat. Hope you like having to aim while you plod along your level treadmill!
• Tons of classes nuked. Tons. After this rolls out there will be nine classes. Total. That's it. From 35 to 9. Most of these changes involve similar classes being condensed into one, for example, all you diverse crafters? Sorry, there's just one big crafting class now. Enjoy!
• "Force Sensitive" is now a starting class. Whats that? You spent years of level grinding to unlock your FS Slot? Sucks to be you. Hope you like playing an MMORPG full of nothing but Jedi!
• Classes are now permanent. You can't start as one class, realize it sucks, and then change your character to another class in a desperate attempt to make it not suck. No, now you get to start a new character.

And, of course, much much more. Like bugs! Can't forget horrible game-crippling bugs! It just wouldn't be a Sony overhaul without the bugs!

To further confuse and annoy people, this all comes right on the heels of the release of the "Trials of Obi-Wan" expansion that went live yesterday. So if anyone new actually went out and bought it, they'll get to deal with a complete change of how the game works within weeks of starting. That's a great way to keep people on-board! Super job, Sony!

This, however, doesn't affect me whatsoever because I've done a pretty good job of staying outside the blast radius of the SWG train-wreck. Despite this, I'm very glad this was brought to my attention. It's always good to keep up-to-date on the status so you can know when to browse the SWG forums for hilarious drama. The big updates like this one and the original Combat Upgrade always draw out some of the most unbelievably angry people on the planet, people who will gladly write 7-page-long diatribes about how they consider this patch a personal attack on them by SOE, and that the horrors of the patch can be roughly compared to puppy genocide. So be sure to keep an eye out over there. It should be quite entertaining to watch from a distance.

And in other news, EA of Japan has apparently decided that SWG has been such a colossal failure in Japan that it's time to shut down their servers. EA handles the Japanese publishing of SWG, and thus runs their servers. Apparently the hilariously over-saturated asian MMORPG market just doesn't have any room for SWG. The six or seven people actually still playing SWG in Japan will have to transfer their characters to the North American or European servers, where they will get to deal with the hilarious drama only Sony can create.

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