I rather agree with a lot of what I'm hearing here. Just recently, I resubscribed after a six-month hiatus. And the game is still pretty bad. I've noticed a couple improvements to the mechanics since I left, and it doesn't feel quite as unpolished and pulled-out-of-someone's-bum-and-thrown-together-at-the-last-second as before, but it's still pretty bad. And it's so damn fast. Personally, I preferred the slow combat- it was nice to have some time to react and plan. But you probably don't need to plan when your combat operations are limited to point, shoot, fire that special that does more damage, heal. (The other specials are okay, I guess.. but they feel like extra fluff, and I would need three hands to incorporate them with any sort of fluidity.) I'm really getting little to no entertainment out of it. I'll head back up into space before too long and hopefully do some roleplaying again, but I doubt I"ll stay. Like they say, just not worth it. I wouldn't say the game is dead... at least not yet. It's more in a state of living death. I've been surprised to see that a number of people seem to have come back at the same time as I. Supposedly, they did it for the community. They've been here and there in this game and that, and none of them had the same level of community as SWG. Curious.
As for the prospect of Bioware taking up the game... Highly doubtful in my opinion. The whole thing was unfinished from the beginning and has since had these two huge revamps pasted onto it. Right now it resembles something akin to the concrete shell that was built over the blasted-out Chernobyl reactor back in the 80s. The only thing left to open debate is which one is crumbling faster. It would be much more feasible for Bioware to make a new game. And I would be happy to play it, provided that it allowed profession dabbling in an open-ended system that allowed content for a variety of player types form crafting fiends to roleplayers to combat junkies. And if it had NO CHARACTER LEVELS. God, I hate levels. I guess a relatively easy partial solution to overpowered templates would be to set limits to how high certain skills could be modified. It would by no means prevent the 'flavour of the month' problem, but it could at least help.
