Thud logged in shortly after reinstalling the client, and informed me that the Bazaar (that is, auction house) was nearly empty – and this on a holiday weekend. Also that our houses were still standing, and he couldn’t afford the back maintenance fees to get in to his.

I tried to log in the next day, and the server was down. Oh, the nostalgia! I tried to log in again this morning, and… the server was down.

Not that it’s anything personal, because as you can see, all of the servers are down, and there aren’t many left.

I was planning to save my blog post until after I actually got into the game, and it’s true I wasn’t expecting it to be kind. I mean, just knowing that the abandoned house problem still hasn’t been resolved is enough. Basically, this doesn’t just mean that you can’t afford the back taxes if you return to the game after having canceled your account for some time. It means that house has been clogging up the landscape for all of the other players. For years! They are supposed to play a dwindling game full of ghost houses? Not only that, since the abandoned structures are taking up all that space, the players who remain can no longer build viable cities, since there is a limit to the number of cities the planets can hold. As buggy and annoying the gameplay always was, the one thing SWG used to get high ratings for was the sense of community – elusive to cultivate but worth a lot of longtime subscribers for the developer – and they’ve killed even that.

The abandoned houses are still standing? The servers are still always down?

And they reinvited all of their past players to come see all this?

Sometimes when Thud and I are talking about video games and such, one of us will say, “Hey – you know what would make a great MMORPG? Star Wars.” Maybe someday someone will make one.