It was never a good game, but a game with ALOT of potential. However after Ralph Koster left it was doomed
The game's release was a shambles and people only give a game one chance so SWG would never recover. However it was improving with the aditions of player housing and EU servers, i met ALOT of nice people.
One great thing i can say about SWG was the community was fantastic, the ebst i've seen out of any game. However the community soon became bitter and hateful and turned into one of the worst i've seen, all because of SOE and LA ****ing everyone off.
They game started going downhill really after Ralph Koster left, as the game was his vision. The developers started to make changes that would ruin the game and he wouldn't dream of making and all along said no to. The input of Jedi IMO was the first real big hit the game took. Everyone wanted to be Jedi so the game all turned into everyone Grinding out Jedi :( It stayed like this throughout the game and it's a shame. I wanted it to just be about the existing professions and instead the game got ruined.
After JTLS and TEF being removed and all these game breaking changes i left, even before the CU or NGE. The game was just pure crap then and couldn't be saved by the horrible people in charge. Why did JTLS ruin the game? Well it ruined the social aspects of the game and thats what many of us played it for. No more queues for at starport and having nice chats for instance.
So after JTLS it got ruined by Publish 9 making Jedi easier to get......... Then ROTW expansion which basically changed the whole way the game worked. The the CU came not long after that and changed the game compeltly again! Added levels and crap when there was no need for it. Then the final blow came which was the NGE :(
The NGE really just turned the game to something original to trying to be a bad evrsion of WOW. It was sooo bad.... and they took everything out of the game. Now they're adding it all back in like it's a new feature or something.
Anyways the game will never be saved and it'll always be crap from now on unless they make classic servers pre Jedi.
The only good thing about it now is the Sound and the value isn't worth a game in alpha lol. Theres just tooo many bugs in the game today to be worth playing at all and the reduction of 32 or so professions down to 9 classes is also a big downgrade.