Vanguard had a bad launch, it was buggy people left us in droves. The game is now playable and its population is recovered from its worst days, not only that but I plan to argue that it is better than your game. Heck I'll even let you make a case for games not released yet, hype away! Convince me I'm wrong, and that I should sub your game. Or at least put up or shut up and leave our forum with your derails.
(this is not in order of importance to me)
Player Created Structures
Not just created, but with stages that show for example a crane. These structures take a considerable amount of effort to make as well, especially as they get larger such as Guild halls, Caravels and the upcoming Galleon ships. You can also decorate these houses with about as much detail as you can housing in say EQ2.
Vanguard may have player created structures, but it doesn't have the freedom that player structures have in Star Wars Galaxies. From what I remember reading, you are limited to certain areas where you can place your housing. Are your houses instanced in Vanguard? Can you set up your own shop in your own house? Can you use any item from your inventory as decoration items in your house?
One of SWG strengths has always been its houseing. Next to it, Vanguard is the only other game that even comes close to rivaling it. SWG you don't exactly have "total" freedom either, you can only set up houses on specific planets not all of them. So housing placement has its restrictions there as well.
The only real "benefit" SWG has over VG that matters is the ability to build player cities. I'm not sure what impact they have in SWG anymore these days.
Well, you have 7 planets (out of 12) that you can choose from to place a house. On those planets, there are no restrictions on where you can or can't place a house, as long as it's not near an NPC city. You also can't place a house in a player city that you don't have zoning rights to. Player Cities still give bonuses to crafters, but their previous combat benefits need to be updated for the current game systems.
FFA PVP
We got it, it's called Sartok. Wait a second don't all pvp games have FFA servers pretty much? No, FFA means no safe spots, no limits, no rule Free-for-all.
SWG lacks a PvP only server, but it does have open world PvP with no instanced PvP. PvP can happen anywhere at anytime. Free-for-all PvP can happen through Guild Wars. There's also possible plans to make cross-server PvP where people from all 26 servers can battle against each other.
SWG was designed to have a heavy PvP element, VG wasn't. The original intention was to put the GCW in the hands of the player community on every server....but they changed that dynamic so many times now.
The GCW still is in the hands of the player, they've just given some more incentives for getting involved with it.
Complex Mob Scripts
Containing:
1. Add spawns, both timed, percentage, random, and curse based.
2. Damage shields, drains, lifetaps, riposte's, immunities, beneficial incoming damage (such as healed by arcane damage etc.), varied resistances, cones (frontal, behind, side), circular aoe's (with varied ranges) both based on the mob and the players (requiring specific spacing in between raid members)
3. Stances and Enchantments which must be removed (sometimes taking multiple classes/casts)
4. Environmental spawns and effects such as blades, poison vents, traps, and plenty of obstacles and props that can and in some cases must be utilized in any successful strategy.
5. Charming, stunning, knock back, tossing (a throw over the bosses shoulder), instant death abilities, aggro loss and wipe, refresh increase, energy/endurance cost increase, casting time increase, and the ability to summon people at range.
6. Abilities and attacks that are not limited to the top of the aggro list (meaning affecting people other than the tank), such as curses that affect people above a certain level on the aggro list, or turn and slap attacks where they will attack someone else high on their aggro list then swap back to the tank.
7. A necessity to have melee in nearly every fight meaning there is no way to get around all area or cone effects by substituting other classes.
8. Important gear progression needed for all classes in order to advance in raid progression.
9. Animations, and NPC warnings that must be paid attention to in order to defeat certain content.
10. Mobs that require the completion of an event to be spawned (often in a timed manner).
Over the last 8 months, SWG has had a lot of variation added to NPC's and their abilities, especially in the recent Heroic Encounters. More often then not, you can't just run in and open up on the NPC and expect that it'll die, doing that will likely kill you or others in your group. SWG still needs work done on this to improve the diversity with NPC's and creatures and if what you list true, then VG may have SWG beaten in this department.
18 Man Raiding
SWG maxes out with 8 person groups, and that's the limit for instances. However, in PvP it's rather normal for groups form both sides to work together against the opposite faction. There's talk by the Devs to make it possible to combine groups together to create "meta groups"
Hooray, both games are raid centric. Both games were intended to be sandboxes, both ended up raiders. Players : 0 , SOE : 2. Who likes raiding anyway?
SWG has always had a raid element to it, whether it was taking a group down the NS caves on Dathomir back in the early days or fighting your way through the Tomb of Exar Kun today. The difference with SWG is that it does still have the sandboxy alternatives, such as Story teller, player cities, etc.
Exploit System
Similar to group "skillchains", sympathetic actions etc. Basically ordering skills with others in order to achieve more damage.
This too plays an important part in SWG. If you plan things right and have certain professions work together to do abilities together in a certain order you can achieve much better results then just firing everything off as they become available.
VG system runs a lot better then SWG's. I'm not sure what the original intention was with SWG system as its been through several major changes...I'll have to log on one of these days and see whats up with that.
In the past, especially before and right after NGE, the SWG specials system was a mess. Some professions didn't even work right.
But both are basically hotkey / timer mashers anyway. I like VG's system better.
Yeah, I remember those days there were professions that had more broken abilities then working ones....as a Pistoleer back then, that was a daily issue for me. These days, all profession abilities work as they're described, and even having new abilities added through the Game Updates. I can't tell you if things work better or not then they do in VG as I haven't tried VG.
Balance
15 Wonderfully balanced classes for PvE content. Okay this one is opinion, but it is the first game I could say this about, what about you? Where every class is wanted from 1-end game? Where everyone CAN solo, and where there are multiple classes for every role and no one class is must have for everything. And where multiple classes are not simply clones of each other, but play very differently (my vote for most varied healer classes in any fantasy MMO) Many classes also have several styles or affinities that they can choose from giving further variety.
SWG do with some work in this department. Spy has a hard time in PvE due to them relying on cloaking as a defense...and cloaking loses agro on NPCs. But for the most parts, every profession has its own role in combat.
No MMO has "balance" according to the communities. VG was intended as a PvE based game and "balance" has a different meaning. I don't know what you would compare it to anyway to get a sence of balance.
FFXI is a group centric game, its balanced according to their design philosophy...can you solo? Hell no. Your not supposted to. It all depends what the intention of the design is.
SWG was always a bit weird in this area especially when it had all of those professions. CU tried to line them up into catagories but that obviously didn't work to well....The only thing I recall was as a smuggler, groups needed me to slice into locked doors and such. Other then that....there was the endless b*tching about Jedis and Bounty Hunters and who was more uber. I don't think Smugglers can slice anymore so that eliminated any need for that guy in a group...My roots never worked right in any version of the combat.
That's true, everyones idea of balanced is going to differ and I'm sure there's people in VG that disagree and think it's horribly unbalanced - there's always a group like that in every game. SWG was never, and could never be balanced back pre-nge due to Jedi being an alpha profession and being designed to be 1.5x stronger then any other profession. Now that has been eliminated and Jedi are no longer the end all be all, things have moved on and much needed attention has been spread amounst all the new professions.
Smugglers can still slice doors and they do have new group roles, such as being able to hide/smuggle a group member (great for medics for out of combat rezzes). They're also pretty good with the debuffs, such as reducing the targets damage and defense abilities.
Chunk System
Rather than zones you have chunks, allowing for a load free world (although there is a slight hang during chunking sometimes, you are generally immune from damage during it and it is very short on most connections). This was a cause of a lot of bugs and lag early on, however Sony (the ones who ruined this game 
) have done a lot to improve it, and are still perfecting it. I love the system however regardless of that occasional hang.
While traveling on the same planet, it's quite possible to travel without ever seeing a load screen in SWG. Crossing zones on planets isn't noticeable either. Traveling between planets does create a load screen though.
SWG has "zones" anytime you leave a planet you are "zoning" somewhere else. Flash load screen, your in space....flash load screen, your on a new planet. The seemless planets are nice though. There is no game that is truely "seemless".
3 Spheres of Advencement
Diplomacy, Adventuring and Crafting. All which are a considerable "grind" (if you want to use that term), and have considerable amounts of content.
Crafting abilities in SWG are their own profession, they're not secondary to combat professions. There are alternative grinds once you hit the max level of 90 as a combat (or crafter) character, such as your Pilot skills or your GCW ranks (which is a grind that never ends due to rank decay).
Both have nice alternitives when compared to other games. SWG has a nice space portion...they added in a year and a half or so after launch....crafting, dunno, crafting is crafting, I'm no fan of it in any game. You assemble junk. As long as I can sell it I don't care how its done, faster is better IMHO. I'm not into watching sliders in front of workstations.
The one thing SWG did have but mangled time and time again was the entertainer. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and make fun of me, I had a master entertainer also pre-NGE (among other toons) and I didn't AFK / Macro him like all the vets did. I actually played it. I'm stupid like that...but it was fun...in a manly sort of way mind you damn it.
Entertainer is in a pretty good place right now (although it depends how you look at it), possibly better then they've been since Launch. They provide the best and most diverse the buffs that most people will not go without. Not only that, but their buffs cannot be AFK'd so you're always dealing with an ATK ent.
But what else is out there? LotR's lol...you can grind or...you can grind. WoW? Kill mobs or don't play. GW, same thing...fight or shut it off.
There are only a very small handful of games that have any real alternitives to combat centric gameplay. VG is one of them. The sad truth is MMO players today don't want that sort of thing anymore. They want the linear and directed gameplay like WoW. If the goal or objective isn't clearly spelled out for them they don't know what to do.
And I guess that's what SOE saw coming when they made the NGE for SWG. However, they've mostly back tracked from most of that or at least given alternatives that are more in-line with the original ideas of SWG, such as Storyteller.
Mounted, Air, and Sea Player Controlled Travel
You can have several land mounts (including upcoming race faction specific mounts 36 in all) , a nice boat , and Flying mounts both of the short term rentable variety, and the uber OMG insane quest line reward ultimate accomplishment type.
Although it started with nothing, SWG does have a rather large variety of ground mounts in the form of both creatures and vehicles. Although I wouldn't call them mounts, you also have the option to have 6 different Space ships. 2 of those ships can be POB ships which you can decorate just like a house on the ground, and they can also be manned by your group in various roles.
Another strength of SWG that was built up over many years (and partially ripped down a few years ago) If I recall, at launch SWG had Zero mounts and vehicles.
Yep, you needed to run everywhere on foot, if you couldn't afford the shuttle ticket.
A Large World
I would say its easily as big or bigger than most on the market. Fully open to travel with flying open mounts too.
I dunno if it'd be the biggest, it'll be pretty hard to challenge SWG to world size. There's 12 different planets, 11 space zones, around 23 different instances and a space station.
How old is SWG? 2003 launch? I would expect any MMO out that period of time to literally be busting with areas and content. SWG didn't have half of what it does now after its first year. It didn't even have space after its first year. It use to be called "Ground Wars".
It did have the 10 launch planets though, and they're not exactly small with a size of 16kmx16km for each planet.
An Average of added substantial content, at all levels of the game at least every quarter
Something any good MMO should strive for, however many do not. Or no longer do.
SWG has been getting new content about every 2 months in the form of Chapters. They've also started Game Updates which happen about every 3-4 weeks (on a seperate cycle to Chapters) which includes profession specific content for professions that are in the focus of that Update.
Early on, SWG updates were a mess / unpredictable and sparatic especially before and at the beginning of NGE. It wasn't until these new devs started this chapter system that things really started flowing smoothly.
Not only that, but updates back then very rarely had content, they were all mostly tweaks, nerfs and bug fixes that required their own fixes in future updates. That's the benefit of more recent games, the companies have (hopefully) learnt from mistakes they've made in their previous games and make sure players of the newer games don't experience that - I hope VG doesn't have to experience alot of what happened back then. As you said though, SWG has moved on from that and the updates are much more smoother flowing and actually have content!
