Out of Pod Experience

Yep, that was probably one of the biggest issues, they ripped out the skill tree system for a class system something like you'd find in WoW. The skill tree system was essentially an EVE type system, training one skill to unlock another to train. They were categorized by classes but you can train any skills from many class to mix and match however you wanted to build. There was a cap, but unlike EVE the amount of skills were more limited, 100's instead of 1000's. A lot more skills than UO had though.

But there were a lot of other issues (or detriments), Jedi wasn't really much of a problem. That effected a very small percentage of the player-base, as there were not many that unlocked Jedi anyway. Most didn't even want to unlock Jedi. The game would have done better without them at all, as SW canon is more in line with and which most recognized.

But if you heard a bit of players complaining thinking Jedi was the problem, I wouldn't doubt you heard that from them. To unlock Jedi, you essentially had to have no life whatsoever. So, essentially you had very young and compulsive people unlocking Jedi (not all of them) and whining about almost everything since that was mostly the entirety of their lives. whine whine whine whine, seriously. All the whining and all the tears, it made it irresistible for players to train bounty hunters to hunt them down and perma-kill them!

But, people that like EVE, I know many of them would of liked SWG. The two games had a lot in common. A lot of SWG players came here after NGE. I'll dig up the graph here... http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-2.png
Notice the data points between EVE and SWG. The SWG slide happened at the NGE data point, sliding as long term subscriptions had already been abandoned at that point and eventually running out. SWG and EVE make a big X in the chart, many SWG players jumped ship to EVE. Likely, half that stuck around SWG did so due to having the SOE all access pass, mostly playing other games. I had one at the time, but I just canceled the whole thing at that point. SOE was ripping all their games to shreds at that point, wasn't worth the $22/mo any longer. SOE isn't even around any longer, they punked their subscribers around for too long.

Imagine you log into EVE tomorrow and SURPRISE!!!!!!!! - there's a new change where instead of all of the different skills and skill que system that you had for the past 6+ years, you had to respec your toon into: Freighter pilot, Gank pilot, Miner, Station trader - and that's it - NO mixing and matching...

Sudden, unannounced, unwanted, unliked changes tend to severely cheese people off...
(comments from 8+ year bittervet of SWG)