From what I've read, the new system is pretty different/bad. I'd like to see some hard figures on how many subs they actually lost. Every new change brings a horde of players claiming they will cancel their fifteen SWG accounts, so who knows.

I read a funny comment on the SWGS forums where a long-time player said he hated the new system but that he would try to learn to like it. That's just sad. I know community and friendship is a big thing in MMOs but there are other ways to communicate with people than subjecting yourself to a game that isn't any fun.

Either way, if UO can go on for all these years, SWG isn't going anywhere any time soon.

Oh, whoops. I also wanted to says that if Smed had to register an account to tell everyone it's gonna be okay, they must be hurting.

You played the original version as I recall... what was the “unique HAM combat system”?

(assuming it is not beating each other with cured pig segments of course)

You guessed it!

No, it was interesting but odd...

You had health, mind, and action. For those, you had 3 stats each (9 stats total). One stat affected your total health pool. Another stat affected you pool regeneration rate. The final one of the three affected how many health points your special abilities used. It was the same for the other two groups of three but for mind and action.

Damage and action took for the same pool. That is, when you shot someone with a pistol, you drained some of your HAM. Repeatedly using special moves would drain your health just as fast as any enemy could.

Health and action were the only ones that could be healed by medics; though, mind could be healed by a good combat medic (but this wasn't as common/easy).

When one of your bars reaches zero, you become incapacitated. You die if a killing blow is performed on you (not all creatures are murderous - some are passive or even just defensive of their home). If nothing or nobody kills you off, you slowly regenerate from negative HAM points until you're “alive” again.

It was definitely an interesting system. It was annoying at times that you were killing yourself by attacking but I dunno.. I didn't find it too bad for those reasons. There were many other factors that messed up the system and contributed to combat being broken (many of which were evident in beta but ignored).

How did the combat queue work? And did you have defensive skills that were actually defensive rather than raising your passive defenses?

The combat queue really wasn't all that big of a thing. I actually prefer the WoW-style cooldown abilities (yes, they obviously didn't invent the concept).

Basically, it was the exact same as WoW but less obvious and was queueable. You put abilities into a queue. All abilities had cooldown times (some were 0 of course). They executed as their turn came up.

What this actually allowed you to do is set up a string of attacks and go take a pee. I've actually done it before. In a battle you know you will win, you just queue up a bunch of attacks and take a nap.

What the new system will do is force you to be at the keyboard more. SWG has an extensive macroing system, so people get very offended when they are required to play the game. It is a long grind to Jedi, so people actually came up with unattended macros to to fight creatures and gain xp. It is sad but true.

Defensive skills? Hmm.. no, not really. There were some tactical things that would contribute to defense, I suppose. Pistols have moves like dive shot, roll shot (roll to kneeling from prone or standing), etc. So using these active moves could make you harder to hit. In reality, they weren't very effective and were rarely used. In fact, pistols sucked altogether.

So no.