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Star Wars Galaxies is horrible
Jasconius
sword criminalmad onlineRegistered User regular
sword criminalmad onlineRegistered User regular
Sigh.
I received in my inbox, over a week late, an e-mail from SOE stating that they had reactivated everyone's account for the month of July! Apparently not everyone's account since my primary account which contains my only non-crafter character was not activated and thus inaccessible.
I have some sort of disorder where I
1) Silently wish that this game was not horrible
2) Insist on periodically checking up on it to see how terrible it gets.
Star Wars Galaxies to my knowledge is the only MMO, maybe even the only video games overall that has been ruined thoroughly by patching and additional development. I'm not talking about "wahh they took away some weapon in Counter Strike". I'm talking about "what the fuck is going on here"?
Since I did not have my beloved "main" character (and to hell with them if they think I would pay to reactivate him at this point) I logged into my crafting alt.
Upon logging in, my crafter had apparently been last logged out in the middle of the desert. Before I could even assess my situation I was overcome by a slew of pop ups.
Immediately I was confronted by the class selection screen. What about my old class? I was a Master Weaponsmith and Shipwright, was I not allowed still to do that? No explanation of the class change was given (I mean, the mechanics of what the fuck will happen to all my hard earned skills). Since I was hesitant to pick some spin-off of the crafter discipline and get stuck as a level 1 crafter I chose Bounty Hunter and was reduced to level 1 from months of grinding crafting.
After this I was immediately messaged by HAN SOLO who informed me, in the middle of nowhere on Lok that he was going to get me a Speeder. Even though I already owned three. He gave no explanation as to why, where I could pick it up, or anything. Just that he was going to give me one. I closed the dialogue box and nothing happened.
Yet another dialogue box promptly awarded me a level 1 weapon, appropriately called "Bounty Hunter Carbine". I didn't know they made such distinctions with low grade munitions, and it was a severe step down from the cool weapons my main character used to have such as the "Spec Ops Bola Carbine" or even silly designations such as "DX-22" sound at least plausible.
Then finally I could get along to the "Veteran Rewards" where I was promptly given three years of retroactive bonuses simply for logging in, having only paid 2 or 3 months of the account I was still given over three years worth of rewards, each one requiring navigating through three separate pop up windows.
10 years later when I had finally waded through all the pop ups I was able to actually move my character. My stout little Rodian pivoted around with the unconventional perversion of the standard WASD format where E and Q are the defacto for strafing. I decided I need to get back to civilization, so I opened my DATAPAD with the obvious default hotkey of "K", selected one of my speeders which materialized from thin air and I went on my merry way.
My laborious journey to Lok's only space port allowed me to notice that
1) SWG operates at 1024x768 and has no user friendly way to change this setting. To change it I had to edit a config file to get it up to my Widescreen resolution of 1680x1050. But in SWG, changing the resolution doesn't actually scale the graphics, it simply reveals more viewable area. This alone is quite perverse since if I really wanted to I could have set it up to go onto my second monitor and increased my FOV dramatically. That's fairly dubious for a game that is supposed to blend in twitch elements to PVP.
2) Apparently my GeForce 7900GS does not support AA, according to the options panel, so even with all the graphics settings maxxed out the tons of tiny objects, flora, and distant NPC's looked hideously dated.
When I got to the Starport I selected one of my two Tie Fighters which can now be accessed regardless of what planet they were docked at, and traveled to Theed, which was the primary player city of the olden days.
It was completely fucking empty, thus putting a brutal period on the end of the horrible sentence that is this game. Even if SWG were amazing, we'd never know, because nobody is playing it. Unlike games like Vanguard which responded to low populations by server merging, SWG still runs over a dozen servers, only four of which seem to have any player activity.
This is extremely problematic since literally the entire game design concept of SWG was player generated content. Since the beginning, the idea was player. generated. everything. Player cities, player economy, player faction wars, player supply and demand on the loot of every creature from Bestine to Dathomir. There are no people playing SWG thus all of this is for naught.
Disappointed with the lack of people to communicate with, and since Han hadn't gotten back to me on the Speeder I didn't ask for or need I logged out.
Still, interested slightly in if they really had anything to offer and giving them the benefit of the doubt that the combination of my character being in the middle of the desert for three years and the total lack of people on Tarquinaas I decided to make a new character on Bloodfin, one of the seemingly populous servers.
But that is an entirely different headache, and a different post down the road.
TL;DR - SWG reactivated accounts and is still horrible. It continues to make stunningly horrible design choices and welcomes its players back in an inexcusably bad way.
Reminisce about the good old days when SWG was at least tolerable as an ambitious but poorly implemented Star Wars MMO.
I received in my inbox, over a week late, an e-mail from SOE stating that they had reactivated everyone's account for the month of July! Apparently not everyone's account since my primary account which contains my only non-crafter character was not activated and thus inaccessible.
I have some sort of disorder where I
1) Silently wish that this game was not horrible
2) Insist on periodically checking up on it to see how terrible it gets.
Star Wars Galaxies to my knowledge is the only MMO, maybe even the only video games overall that has been ruined thoroughly by patching and additional development. I'm not talking about "wahh they took away some weapon in Counter Strike". I'm talking about "what the fuck is going on here"?
Since I did not have my beloved "main" character (and to hell with them if they think I would pay to reactivate him at this point) I logged into my crafting alt.
Upon logging in, my crafter had apparently been last logged out in the middle of the desert. Before I could even assess my situation I was overcome by a slew of pop ups.
Immediately I was confronted by the class selection screen. What about my old class? I was a Master Weaponsmith and Shipwright, was I not allowed still to do that? No explanation of the class change was given (I mean, the mechanics of what the fuck will happen to all my hard earned skills). Since I was hesitant to pick some spin-off of the crafter discipline and get stuck as a level 1 crafter I chose Bounty Hunter and was reduced to level 1 from months of grinding crafting.
After this I was immediately messaged by HAN SOLO who informed me, in the middle of nowhere on Lok that he was going to get me a Speeder. Even though I already owned three. He gave no explanation as to why, where I could pick it up, or anything. Just that he was going to give me one. I closed the dialogue box and nothing happened.
Yet another dialogue box promptly awarded me a level 1 weapon, appropriately called "Bounty Hunter Carbine". I didn't know they made such distinctions with low grade munitions, and it was a severe step down from the cool weapons my main character used to have such as the "Spec Ops Bola Carbine" or even silly designations such as "DX-22" sound at least plausible.
Then finally I could get along to the "Veteran Rewards" where I was promptly given three years of retroactive bonuses simply for logging in, having only paid 2 or 3 months of the account I was still given over three years worth of rewards, each one requiring navigating through three separate pop up windows.
10 years later when I had finally waded through all the pop ups I was able to actually move my character. My stout little Rodian pivoted around with the unconventional perversion of the standard WASD format where E and Q are the defacto for strafing. I decided I need to get back to civilization, so I opened my DATAPAD with the obvious default hotkey of "K", selected one of my speeders which materialized from thin air and I went on my merry way.
My laborious journey to Lok's only space port allowed me to notice that
1) SWG operates at 1024x768 and has no user friendly way to change this setting. To change it I had to edit a config file to get it up to my Widescreen resolution of 1680x1050. But in SWG, changing the resolution doesn't actually scale the graphics, it simply reveals more viewable area. This alone is quite perverse since if I really wanted to I could have set it up to go onto my second monitor and increased my FOV dramatically. That's fairly dubious for a game that is supposed to blend in twitch elements to PVP.
2) Apparently my GeForce 7900GS does not support AA, according to the options panel, so even with all the graphics settings maxxed out the tons of tiny objects, flora, and distant NPC's looked hideously dated.
When I got to the Starport I selected one of my two Tie Fighters which can now be accessed regardless of what planet they were docked at, and traveled to Theed, which was the primary player city of the olden days.
It was completely fucking empty, thus putting a brutal period on the end of the horrible sentence that is this game. Even if SWG were amazing, we'd never know, because nobody is playing it. Unlike games like Vanguard which responded to low populations by server merging, SWG still runs over a dozen servers, only four of which seem to have any player activity.
This is extremely problematic since literally the entire game design concept of SWG was player generated content. Since the beginning, the idea was player. generated. everything. Player cities, player economy, player faction wars, player supply and demand on the loot of every creature from Bestine to Dathomir. There are no people playing SWG thus all of this is for naught.
Disappointed with the lack of people to communicate with, and since Han hadn't gotten back to me on the Speeder I didn't ask for or need I logged out.
Still, interested slightly in if they really had anything to offer and giving them the benefit of the doubt that the combination of my character being in the middle of the desert for three years and the total lack of people on Tarquinaas I decided to make a new character on Bloodfin, one of the seemingly populous servers.
But that is an entirely different headache, and a different post down the road.
TL;DR - SWG reactivated accounts and is still horrible. It continues to make stunningly horrible design choices and welcomes its players back in an inexcusably bad way.
Reminisce about the good old days when SWG was at least tolerable as an ambitious but poorly implemented Star Wars MMO.
Jasconius on
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Now I have a love and hate relationship with SOE. Yeah, they totally decimated my favorite MMO and soul crushing addiction....at the same time they took it away. Still, I mostly hate them now. In reference to the NGE...the fact that a company can do something like they did, lose as many customers directly from that design decision, and never admit defeat boggles the mind. Instead of reverting the changes like any sane company would do, they just ran with it and continue to do so to this day.
I...I just want to go back to my little shop in Corellia, or maybe hunt down storm troopers for holocrons and crystals.
The game simply had so much atmosphere. I can't even imagine how many late nights I've spent just cruising to some far end of Endor with a bunch of friends on our swoops for some obscure little discovery badge.
maybe you aren't using the force hard enough
(it is SO BAD)
I thought that the player run nature of the game was the absolute best, especially the way the crafting/equipment system worked. One great thing I can remember from relatively early on was sitting outside the only master weaponsmith's place, waiting for the first batch of some awesome vibro knucklers with a bunch of other people like they were new iphones.
God I miss Pre-Cu. SOE should bring up a Pre-CU server and let everyone start over. I don't even care if they keep in the 99% Comp armours that allowed Teras Kasi pimps like me to solo Kyrats and stuff. Just bring back Pre-Cu, and let us have some city warfare.
Later on when player citys were bustling I remember some fabulous raids on imperial citys. Massive laser cannons pew pewing us, Teras Kasi standing in the front spamming our spinning kicks all buffed in the mind, then AT-ST's come walking over in the dozens and its ruh roh.
Bad Memory. The mission terminals in Bestine were bugged and spawned missions in the city limits, which immediately killed the mission spawns and thus, instant mission complete. A lot of imperials became rich fuckers that day. Us poor rebels paid the price when they were able to field insane number of AT-ST's against us. I suppose the target rich environment wasn't bad.
Makes me wonder how that Pre-Cu indy project is going.
I blame SOE's corporate culture of smoke weed every day and eat weed brownies then do a line of Colombia's finest then have development meetings.
It was the first time I'd thought about SWG in six months. Funny to see a thread about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
The most consistent message I was able to pick up on throughout all of the regime changes and "letters to the community" posts was that the original game design was too difficult for them to balance properly. When you have dozens of profession combinations I suppose that that is a legitimate problem, but the CU didn't actually address that, you could still double-master in combat professions which allowed "super classes" like Pikeman/TK or CM/Rifleman.
The CU in my opinion was this
"OKAY, we have a ton of classes, we cannot feasibly balance them by adjusting weapons/armor and other external factors so let's revamp statistics to make them less abuse-able and revamp skills to simplify the 'special' abilities of each class, narrowing their potential thus dumping a lot of combat prowess directly on to equipment"
"While we are at it let's completely nullify faction NPC's which were one of our marquee features, these three Rancor vs. 1 AT-ST and 3 Commando Trooper battles in the middle of Theed are just stupid. Faction NPC's can only attack overt PC's now and CH's can only have one pet at a time"
"Also to reduce downtime let's completely trivialize the role of doctors and entertainers, thus pissing off a surprisingly large percentage of the player base, two major class trees of the game are now completely worthless to the faction war, our primary mode of gameplay. This makes sense."
"And since we are ruining the game we might as well make Jedi something easily attainable for everyone, removing all consequences of being a Jedi, they may now roam freely with very little penalty other than Bounty Hunters. This will create a two-class game since Jedi's are cool and Bounty Hunters can make more credits hour than anyone in the game by colluding with Jedi PC's to collect free bounties, all the effort we put into the balancing of this game will be reduced to nothing since the primary goal of any player who isn't a Jedi is to class and gear themselves in such a way that killing Jedi is either plausible or downright easy. Since only two or three class combinations fall under this category we no longer have to worry about developing for the rest of them!"
"In the process of this we will do nothing to address the social decay of the game in reference to massive amounts of structure spam, the ridiculous nature of harvester management, the rapid decay of armor and weapons which allows successful crafters to attain tens of billions of credits while your average non-BH PC can only dream of breaking into the tens of millions. We will also not fix the numerous problems with the faction war until well after the NGE, where had we done it at this point the game probably would have lived on."
I got in, chose Jedi, did the Legacy quest to level 48, went to Dathomir, killed Spiders, capped at 90, got into a guild, killed HK-47, got the lightsabre crystal from some boss, master cloak, Old Republic lightsabre, YT-2100 and YT-1300 (iirc), capped my flying skill, achieved Ace, killed the Corellian cruiser or a corvette or whatever, and then after a month, quit, there wasn't much to do aside from get a jetpack and the lava lightsabre crystal.
Boring. WoW like. Stupid.
The problem is that for every good thing they add, they add three stupid things or remove two previously existing good things.
From my reading apparently the faction war is as plausible and entertaining as it has ever been, in theory. They basically ripped off the WoW honor system and participating in large scale PVP now has legitimate benefits. Faction bases are now working as they are supposed to as well. Planets like Rori which were designed for PVP are actually usable now.
The problem is that it's all too late. Nobody plays it, and there's too much shit to wade through to get to something resembling enjoyable gameplay.
If they could just clean the current game up and remove all the bugs and horrible rot left over from design choices made 6 years ago in beta the game might actually be enjoyable. But that all hinges on people actually playing it.
Basically what it really needs is to just have a complete server wipe, and the game be made free to play for about 3-6 months. That would generate interest and stimulate the population to actually participate in all the content they have put in.
I maintain that JTL is an excellent expansion pack. It's everything you could want from an X-Wing style game and more, but since nobody plays it and the developers don't develop content for it, it has just stagnated for 3-4 years. If you could get 100+ people all fighting in deep space... holy shit, you're talking about fun that far outweighs anything you would find in Hillsbrad.
The problem is that they tried to build an FPS style combat system out of an MMO style target/shoot framework.
The result is something similar to Tabula Rasa except a hell of a lot less intuitive.
Actually the biggest problem with the NGE combat is that the skills (at least when I last played it thoroughly) are extremely powerful in comparison to regular firing, so a lot of duels really came down to who managed their cooldowns better.
The fact that every class can heal themselves doesn't help much either.
I'm not done scrutinizing this game yet, I've got three weeks left of free play time.
I'm going to start a new character from scratch and see how it handles on a populated server. I think that if you could get 5-8 people organized together and a play group then it would actually be fun. Which is why this game needs so badly to be free-to-play so that sort of thing would be remotely possible.
And those poor poor Creature Handlers.
I'm scared to check out the servers. I played a few months of the nge back when it launched. I don't want my rose colored glasses to be stomped on further.
I started a new smuggler today and went through some of the starter missions (not the tutorial space station ones, the actual Mos Eisley ones).
So far the only thing I have noticed that is actually *bad* about it is the graphics which glitch a lot, also there's no music for whatever reason. It's also a bit laggy but that could very well be my connection.
The quests aren't sparkling but hey did we really expect anything better?
I just got my Rebel Pilot training so I'm going to go plug in my joystick...
Some of the servers are actually reading "Heavy" population and indeed on Bloodfin Mos Eisley has several dozen people, most of which are just conversing but at least there's people.
It's frustrating since my super rich super-geared character is on Tarquinaas which has practically zero people on it.
The veteran rewards thingy is just how Sony does them. They give out vet rewards by Station account age, not by time played.
Oddjob:
Blame SOE's SWG department. Vanguard and EQ2 have had dramatic turnarounds in the face of low populations, while SWG has just stagnated further and further.
I remember when the NGE came out almost the entire staff of Computer Gaming World picked up the game and they said the actually enjoyed it.
I got my pilot training and I went out into space. The early missions are painfully easy for someone with a joystick, probably tuned just right with a mouse.
It was fairly enjoyable for about 2 hours but then the missions give way to hours of space grind which are basically just the previous missions all over again. You can't go to other trainers and get different missions either, they all shut off when you reach X point.
I was able to buy a Y-Wing without financial assistance which was cool.
But basically at this point I can't justify 5+ hours of level grinding for a game that I'm not likely to be paying for again.
I think I ended up going Pistoleer/Smuggler which was mediocre pre-CU, then CM/Rifle... a brief detour to Master Swordsman (olol mind pool)... then back to Pistols/Smug in the CU, and then Pike/TKA (which was basically god mode in the CU with the right gear).
I even hit master squad leader too.
Then for one weekend I went Master BH and made millions of credits off of a huge group of AFK macro grinding jedi I found on Kashyyk.
With Pikeman/TKA in the CU I could solo the first half of DWB, with only food buffs. We cleared DWB with three people.
Your experience pretty much sums mine up. I was standing in the middle of Lok. My main at the time of the CU and the NGE was a MBH, MCarbine but I must have been playing around with the respec devices in my inventory as I was a level 80 jedi but with only the first gen lightsaber. I figured I'd just go buy the materials and make a better damage dealing saber... when I realized I had 0 credits to my name.
I had forgotten that I had put a pa hall down before discontinuing my account, and of course the game had slowly drained funds from my bank to pay for maintenance, so millions of hard earned blood money was gone on a pa hall that was nowhere to be found. Sigh.
So I used one of my respec devices, and went commando, figured I'd give that shot. Thankfully I had put all the important stuff in my yacht instead of in the pa hall.
I think from a new user perspective the game isn't half bad. The community (while decimated) is quite good, and there is actual combat to be had once again. Of course as a previous player it is damn hard to get used to the lack of custom skills. I liked having the option of choosing different skill trees, combined with others.
For giggles, I turned my Master Sniper into the bastard "Entertainer" class, which promptly put me at max level for that class. Turns out, if you pick that class you are permanently Combat Level 1 and exist solely as a "social class", barely able to kill womprats. You cannot gain combat experience and none of your "buffs" do anything remotely useful except for a negligible XP buff that lasts for 4 hours.
At least with the old system you could enjoy the other half of the game while still being a crafter or dancer/musician.
I had tons of fun with Pikeman. Granted, I was Pikeman/Fencer with a tree in Teras Kasi.
I remember how hilarious PvP was when I had mind disease, mind poison, and mind fire weapons. Nobody really stood a chance, and Fencer defense was pretty damn strong at the time so it was just a ridiculous powerhouse build - though not really as overpowered as the FotM Combat Medic / Rifleman madness.
The funny thing is in the CU Pikeman was incredibly good and Carbineer was at least average.
Oh yeah I know all about the housing costs, luckily I never owned anything so grand as a PA hall, but my crafter character had a house packed up for over three years, I logged on and he only had 5 million credits left from what used to be 20 million.
Luckily they reduced maintenance costs dramatically recently so my main character who has something like 80 mill has enough to keep his house up for something like... 120 years? heh.
Indeed, it's just that, a siren call. I want this game to be good, because I know it has potential. I spent a few hours today really trying to give it an objective take. Without going into incredible detail, really the game is not bad. It's just not good either, and that's the problem, especially with the price tag. It's held to a very high standard as a Star Wars game and everything "bad" about it that I came across I just asked myself "well, do other games do the same thing" and the answer was almost always yes.
One day when SOE has a game that I actually want to pay money for I may just get the station pass so I can log into SWG every now and then, but since they don't I really can't bring myself to pay for something that is just average at best.
Pike only became ridiculously powerful when you found the rarely dropped Nightsister Lances with stupidly powerful dots. Otherwise, the only strength in pike was the knockdowns, which were self-defeating. :P
But yea, when you paired it with defenses from Fencer and TKM, pretty unstoppable. Then again, TKM was pretty unstoppable alone. :P
TKM pre-CU was just ridiculous.
The only positive thing about the CU was the removal of the Dizzy debuff. An ability that both knocks you down AND makes it impossible to get up? Come ooooooon.
The nightsister lances were eventually replaced by a huge selection of Pikes in the kashyyyk expansion, like every other quest reward was a pike. Really.
Going on Nightsister hunts with my friends was as hilarious as it was epic. One friend was a master Ranger, so when we had our massive camp set up way in the middle of nowhere in Dathomir it was awesome. Preparing to take on some of the toughest enemies in the game way deep into the unfriendliest planet in the game was pretty crazy.
One of the best moments was when I was giving my friend shit because a Rancor took down one of his bikes, so he had to use his slow as hell landspeeder. A few minutes later as we were running away from a massive group of Nightsisters, I had forgotten to store my swoop bike and they randomly one shotted it. >_<
Thus ends the age of having to constantly store/recall your vehicle.
Yes Jedi, I hunted you down, I staked out your safehouse and waited for you to come back from grinding. I sniped you, and as you ran for your precious doorstep I rooted you and continued to snipe you, as the inconspicuous droid on your doorstep began to blow up in your face. We couldve kept things professional, but you had to spam the hate. So I danced on your corpse, and posted a video of me poplocking on the forums. GG
I loved Ranger, and Pikeman. So much fun. And smuggler. SOE didnt think these classes coutned though. 4 months after the game came out, the devs said "Smugglers will get a revamp soon, and can smuggle, it'll be great" They still cant smuggle.
Jedi were the whinest players ever. In SWG to die you had to be incapacitated, then get deathblown in a few moments, rather it was by an enemy player in PVP or a enemy mob.
Jedi had a skill called "Avoid incapacitation"
Basically, imagine a paladin's bubble skills in WoW. Only it lasts 30 seconds, costs almost no mana, and the paladin can still fight at 100% capability during it
So after a few months of that, the devs put a snare on it. If you used avoid incap, you had a 50% speed reduction and couldnt /forcerun faster than someones speeder like normal.
To this day Ive never seen so much whining about anything on any forums as that.
On the other hand there were Rangers. Who had the best community. Rangers had effectively no usable skills. They could make awesome camps that were useless, they could use traps that were useless, and they could track enemies, but it only had about a 100m more range than just hitting tab. So it was useless. All they could do was harvest a little bit better, like, getting 100 peices of meat from a mob instead of 80
The rangers took it in stride. They gave reasonable, actually good, design ideas. Nothing really imbalanced, or dumb. The devs always said, "Well give you something soon" One of the rangers idea was a sneak ability. You'd have to be prone, and then you could go invisible from sight/radar. Or maybe just sight. The devs said it would be impossible due to the way the game is made.
Later on, the Jedi got a skill that would let them go invisible.
Years later, the devs annoucned a revamp. Hunting blindes, better traps, more utility, that would make the rangers KING of PvE and exploring. It would make every krayt hunting group, or explorers, want a Ranger to lead them. It was fabulous
2 months later the devs announced they would be getting rid of Rangers.
They also get rid of Pikemen, Chefs, Fencers, Swordsmen, Surveyors, and many other classes. Because they werent star warsy enough. They wanted the game to be like the movies and full of immers-ATTENTION YOU CAN NOW ROLE A JEDI AS SOON AS YOU START THE GAME CAUSE ITS ONE OF OUR NOW 8 CLASSES ALSO YOU MEET DARTH VADER AT THE BEGINNING TUTORIAL AND RIDE IN THE MILLENIUM FALCON AND GET A BLOWJOB FROM PRINCESS LEIA WOOOOO
I exaggerated a tiny bit of that last part.
Smugglers can smuggle now, it's just horrible and poorly designed, a complete afterthought.
Wow. You didn't play SWG.
I'm not flippantly denying you played a game called Star Wars Galaxies. I'm sure you bought a box that said "Star Wars Galaxies" on the front and installed whatever discs fell out of that hallowed vessel. It's just that this is not what the game is about, consisted of, or even closely resembled before the NGE.
There's no picking Jedi from the start. Jedi are rare, they're not on every street corner doing mind tricks for spare change. Levels? What? No levels. Skill levels yes, overall character level? None. This whole boss thing and loot progression? Man what?
Original SWG was about spending the day relocating your harvesters, securing trade deals with other players for materials, crafting gear that was better than most drops, selling that gear to a captive audience at a shuttle port, then going out and busting up some Krayt dragons with your buddies for thrills and heading back to the guild pub for a drink and a laugh. It was about building a community out in the desert with your fellow guildmates. Arranging houses on streets, making the place look halfway decent, and having your own shuttleport so you're a stopping point for other players off to parts unknown.
There was a level of immersion achieved in the game where it was fairly easy to actually slip into your characters role. I never considered myself a role player in the game but looking back on it almost everyone was. You could be out doing missions in the desert and come across another player who had set up a camp to rest. Without thinking twice you could sit down in this camp and strike up a conversation. For the most part we weren't heroes...or jedi, we were just random schlubs in that galaxy far far away. Trying to make ends meet and do something worthwhile.
Most of all though, there is nothing about pre-NGE that can even be vaguely described as boring, Wow like, or stupid.
There was a real estate market for crying out loud.