I’m a little late to the conversation, but I really want to illustrate exactly what OP meant when he pointed out Brack’s tenure at SOE(Sony Online Entertainment, the now defunct developers of SWG)

The CU (combat upgrade) and NGE (new game experience) were two massive overhauls, over seen by Brack and Smedly, to SWG that killed the game. This isn’t hyperbole, servers literally died overnight as their populations plummeted after these horrible game changes. SWG by nature was a very social game with player and guild housing beyond its time. Veterans of the game may remember most planets were sparsely populated with NPC towns and instead relied on player built towns and communities. If you wanted to buy something from a high level artisan, say max crafted composite armor, you actually had to seek out the player capable of crafting it and visit their physical store location to purchase it. This is just one example of the level of importance player interaction and community had on the game.

When SOE announced overhauls to the game for “modernization” and to “grow the player base” concern grew in the community that the game would be massively simplified to cater to WoW players. This wasn’t necessarily because SWG players thought WoW was too simple, I actually played both at the time. The concerns were predicated on the fact that WoW was considered a “theme park MMO” and SWG was a “sandbox”. Players feared the more freeform and community focused aspects would be washed away to make room for WoWs automated systems and massively simplified player options. The community outcry was met with an eerily similar response to Brack’s comments on classic wow.

When the first of the updates came through, the player base was furious. The Jedi class, admittedly an archaic and massively unbalanced aspect of SWG was overhauled into a “starting class” along side the previous professions players could pick up when creating their character. This was a huge departure from how it was obtained in the original game release. In order to get Jedi you either had to fully master 3 professions randomly assigned by ultra rare items called holocrons, which were also single use only. Jedi were massively powerful compared to standard professions but had some clear downsides, including perma-death. The developers took this unique asynchronous class design and threw it away overnight. Players who had earned the Jedi class before the update saw their time investment thrown out the window and as some the most active players their departures sent waves across the servers.

This is just a sample of the amount of damage the development team did to SWG in the name of “longevity” and “player acquisition”. With Blizzards current situation and hindsight being 20/20 it’s obvious now the developers saw green and chased it, completely forgetting what made SWG so great as a game. I loved SWG and have fond memories playing with my friends from grade school and even my father (who was a Jedi on the original Flurry server). I still remember the day of the NGE release as the last day I played SWG.

The writing on the walls is clear for blizzard, and while I wish it wasn’t so, it seems this same out of touch development has doomed WoW just as it did SWG almost 10 years ago.

TLDR: SWG Before: Good/SWG After: Bad WoW Before: Good/WoW After: You think you do but you don’t