What was wrong with SWG? It's been forever but I can't honestly remember any real issues, unlike say AO which I can very vividly remember that horrid launch.
Holy. Hell. Just off the top of my head:
-It had literally the worst first day of any MMO Launch ever. One of the first to use web server auth but no one at the company knew how to build a cluster to withstand the load. Less than 10 people logged in first day or something.
-DB issues for months after launch, impacting most of the game aspects on a level similar to
Horizons.
-Worst pop-in of any game I have ever played, in part due to the small loading bubble around player, in part due to the above DB issues.
-Broken skills, encounters, and locations; Z-Axis completely broken at launch; whole professions useless at launch
-Terrible world design; whole planets with vast empty spaces of nothing. End of the second week we had seen every part of every planet, including the wild hostile desert planet and Endor.
-Dev lies about the Jedi class exceeded even the Fiery Avenger claims.
-Later on, Devs set the standard for blowing out an established community with the Combat Updates and then essentially redesigning and relaunching the whole game yet again while it was live with NGE, "New Game Experience". I accidently a whole game.
SWG didn't ruin my childhood but it was an absolute shambles of a game; mostly due to them scrapping whatever had come before and building the entire game from scratch in 18 months. I had a number of friends that stuck it out and played for a while and liked it; reportedly after years it came together more and wasn't the worst game ever. There were some sandboxy elements, and the guys who stayed in my circle were the old UO hands who liked being shopkeepers and mayors of player-towns.
Koster had some good ideas mixed in there; requiring people to go to cantinas for services provided by other players seems to dovetail with some of the other threads decrying the death of social contact in MMOs. I liked the effects and affects from dancing/music. My Creature Taming/Teras Kasi/Carbiner/Medic was a fun character to play, at least for a bit, in the parts of the game that worked. Vast wasted opportunity, though.
