Star Wars Galaxies Review - Edit

Performance/Lag

The lag in this game absolutely confuses me to no end. I swear the lag is worse now than it was in beta and during the first couple months after launch. I specifically remember running through the extremely crowded square outside the Starport in Theed many times with FAR less lag than I get with no one around now. Just today I was running around in the wilderness, absolutely nothing around me, and I was getting 5-9 frames per second. Other times it would run much more smoothly at 20-30 frames per second with nothing noticeable around me to cause the change. It can't be my system because this is the same system I was using the first time I played and I hardly ever noticed any lag then. Like I said, I ran through the middle of the square at Theed and would only drop down to like 15 frames per second. And this was with a couple hundred people around, many of which were creature handlers with their pets out and such. I even tested it today; my settings aren't set extremely high. I keep stuff I don't particularly care about such as shadows turned off. I dropped the settings all the way down on everything and the lag still seemed far too high at time for the areas I was in. If I'm getting 5-9 frames per second in the middle of nowhere with nothing going on around me, and the settings set on low, there's something wrong.

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Customer Service

Well I haven't had any issues for which I needed to contact customer support since I started playing again, but back in the early days of the game it was absolutely horrendous. Quite a few times myself and several members of my guild waited a week or more to get a response to a service ticket only to be sent a link to something in the FAQ or Knowledge Base which in no way solved our problem. In some cases what we were sent to look at was in no way related to our problem.

From what I've heard talking to several people, both in my guild who still play and ingame, while the customer service has gotten better, it's still not all that great. It seems like with as few people playing the game as there is these days that it should take the customer service department far less time to get around to problems. But like I said, I have had no experience with them this go around so I can't really say how they are from first hand knowledge, only from what others have told me.

Summary

Star Wars Galaxies has definitely come a long way since the first days of release. Many issues have been addressed, but unfortunately many still remain. It definitely feels like the developers are listening to the players a little more now than they were in the beginning. The space expansion, Jedi revamp and Galactic Civil War revamp could really go a long way to putting SWG on top. As I said before, this game has unlimited potential, if the developers would listen to the players and tap into that potential than this would easily be the best sci-fi themed MMORPG on the market, if not the best period. The sci-fi section of the MMORPG genre is severely lacking in good titles in comparison to the fantasy section. And add in the fact that it has the Star Wars name tacked onto it and is backed by Lucas Arts it should be a MUCH better game than it is. Hopefully the upcoming changes and expansion will make it the game it should have been from day one.

Pros

• Great Crafting System
• Outstanding Graphics
• Character Customization - Both in appearance and abilities

Cons

• Horrendous Lag for so few people playing
• Lack of a Community - Too Few Players
• Characters too easy to "max out"
• Currently flawed Jedi and PvP systems