Star Wars Galaxies: The Mystery of SWG

Khaldun has wrote a very insightfull essay on SWG, he points out the various places SWG fails as a MMORPG and what could be changed to make it better. Here is a snippet:

Equally, Koster's long-established muleheadness about the importance of creating a sense of achievement in a persistent world entirely through barriers of time and repetition, that there is no other way to challenge players except making advancement have the cadences and feel of "work", really screams out through SWG's design. Players have complained that the game is too easy and too hard all at once, which Koster and Kevin O'Hara and other designers have chortled about and said, "See, they can't even make up their minds, the silly people". What they miss is that this is not a contradiction at all. It's too easy in that if you play it with the intent of advancing and nothing but, you can advance quickly; it's too hard in that the gameplay involved in advancing is with a couple of notable exceptions mind-bogglingly, horrifyingly boring. O'Hara writes, with irritating smugness, that "grind is a state of mind", which is pretty well parroting Koster's conviction on this point.

Woah there is just SOO much right in this essay. Read it here