For anyone who hasn't played SWG let me tell you, before NGE the game was impossibly hard.

Before World of Warcraft came out and when Everquest took over the mmo theme everyone tried to copy and use Everquest as a basic formula on how to create an MMO. Thus the impossible MMOs let's take forever to do anything model came up and that was SWG.

It literally took hours, days, weeks and months and sometimes years just to advance a little.

And it was also supported by a small fringe of the gaming community who we shall call, the elitists who like to play a hard game and believe everything should be hard and it should take months to do anything. Take a party of six to kill a rat take 12 hours to kill a boss. (Think of another MMO that uses the Everquest Formula, FFXI)

Regardless of the NGE, the game was doomed. They tried to make it more like World of Warcraft and in many ways they improved the game and added an actual main story. Problem was that, it's glitched and its support staff were outsourced meaning if you fell in a glitchy hole, you might as well make anew character.

To become a Jedi it literally took people MONTHS and YEARS to do that. People blame NGE for people leaving, no blame WoW. Besides the only people who stayed were and complained about leaving where the elitists.

In fact most evened up joining WoW and they are the ones now complaining that they are lowering the EXP requirements, always whining about making a game easier.

You know what, gamers like that deserve there own MMO, how bout a dungeon or torcher game were it takes them literally days just to advance in the next couple areas and torcher for anyone else to play!

May he rest in peace...  There are many of us in the industry that have a lot on our shoulders, and I really hope many people wake up and realize we can't let life get us down like this.  Yes, it is life, it sucks, but we have to accept that that is just how life is, and we have to focus on the good in our lives, even when there is little good, and expect the worst possible result in all cases and hope for the best, and then you will be happy no matter what the result is and okay if it is worst case...

Best wishes to his family...  Things like this happen in this world unluckily.

 Sad stuff..

It's right though, he has nothing to do with the NGE yet he takes flack as well, when it was Smedley and Torres who were primarily responsible for turning an open-world economy-based MMO like SWG into a WoW clone.

Back when the NGE was released, I too was telling people not to verbally assault good developers like Rogue13 (SWG art dev + Polycount.com founder), but to take the complaints to the brains behind the NGE. But you know, the cool kids keep on shouting at anyone because it's "in" to do it, instead of doing what's right..

And that's why my SWG forum accounts remain closed forever. No one with any respect for honest people - or themselves - would stick with that pile of crap, much less STILL complain to said honest people about lead idiocy committed so very long ago..