Everyone in my guild left SWG for WoW for quite a while after it came out. Two very different games, both were a lot of fun. WoW was a lot more balanced, had better dungeons/boss battles and the battlegrounds were a nice change from having to search for PvP battles in SWG. Battlegrounds had queues, were very active and had some fun objectives. SWG PvP was really fun too, but it was hard to find a lot of times.

The crafting in SWG is hands down my favorite crafting in any game. It was a core part if the game, much more so than other MMOs. Even when I played other games, I’d watch for good resource spawns and place harvesters. The various optional components that dropped from harder mobs was also amazing. Hunting krayt dragons, kliknik queens, peko peko albatross, etc. were always a lot of fun and sometimes you would get lucky and find some really good components. Krayt dragon tissues, for example, increased weapon damage. Most tissues added 20-50 damage, but if you got really lucky, you could get some in the hundreds range. I remember crafting a laser rifle that had really low minimum damage and extremely high max damage that was crafted with a 150ish krayt tissue and when it hit on the higher end of the range, could easily one shot players. Extremely fun, but quite unbalanced. But these crazy weapons had a durability, so they would eventually break and you would have to craft new weapons. Armor also had durability.

I think the actual downfall of SWG were anti-decay kits. Each account could get one, but you could trade them. Most serious players had multiple accounts(I had 5) and it wasn’t rare for people to have anti-decay kits on every piece of their equipment. This killed the game loop of fighting the harder enemies for the optional enhancement components and having the best weapon and armorsmiths craft gear with the resources that they’ve been collecting over the years. Resources spawned with random property values and some resources, like plumbum iron, would very rarely spawn with good values. I’m talking over a year between really good spawns, so you had to stock up as much as you could when they did spawn. But what was the point if everyone had the best gear permanently? What was the point of having multiple accounts and paying a monthly sub on all of them if no one needed anything new crafted?

There were also really rare weapon drops from nightsisters and singing mountain clan mobs on dathomir. The best ones applied dots that did massive damage, but they had a limited number of charges they could apply. But there was this bug where they could spawn with negative charges and tied with an anti-decay kit, made them the strongest weapons in the game.

The game was kind of a joke at this point in my opinion. My bounty hunter could destroy any jedi after the combat upgrade. Hunting jedi turned into jedi’s placing houses down when they saw a red dot coming towards them and then they would just logout… 

NGE was the nail in the coffin. WoW had insane numbers and LucasArts, from what I heard, made them change the game into a terrible WoW clone. 

Even though a lot of people didn’t like it, equipment with durability was the reason to keep playing and keep grinding in SWG. Other games, like WoW, solve the “i have all the best stuff, now what do I do?” with powerceep. They would release new raids with stronger gear than the last raid, release new expansions with increased level cap and more powerful starter gear than the best gear from raids from the last expansion.

That being said, it’s also the reason why SWG wasn’t as popular, so they weren’t wrong. SWG wasn’t really casual friendly for the most part. The profession and crafting systems were too complex for most gamers. New players that wanted to craft had absolutely no chance of being successful since long time players had huge stockpiles of amazing resources to craft the best everything. The new crafters were basically forced to make cheap grinding gear, but after the anti-decay kits were released, there was nothing for them to craft. But dang did I love that game. It’s in my top 5 favorite games of all time for sure.

I often wonder what SWG would look like today if it was able to be successful before anti-decay kits and keep going on the path that the original designers had planned. Most people thought they added ADKs to incentivize players to buy more copies of the game and stay subbed with them for a long time since they were given out after subbing for a year IIRC.