Star Wars Galaxies imploded, restored

A long time ago (Tuesday) in a galaxy far, far, away (Sony Online Entertainment's massively multiplayer online role-playing game Star Wars Galaxies, to be exact), there came a great disturbance in the Force, in the form of the Publish 22 update.

The update contained many changes, the biggest of which adjusted the way experience was doled out to players who had grouped together for a kill, reducing it to a fraction of its previous amount and stymieing the power-leveling plans of many would-be Jedi.

The patch also changed the way such information was communicated to the players. From an announcement about the change on the Star Wars Galaxies official forums:

"The display of experience was altered in order to minimize the notification of individual experience grants, and emphasize the notification of group experience bonus percentages. Since individual experience grants on a per-kill basis decline as group size increases, but the group bonus percentage increases as your group-size increases, we want to place the emphasis on the increasing bonus for grouping rather than on the decreasing individual experience awards."

The changes caused an uproar among players of the game, so much so that SOE announced Thursday afternoon that it was restoring the way experience was calculated to the way it had been prior to the Publish 22 update, although the way experience is displayed to the player will not be changed.

The community clamor over the change continues, however, as a truly epic discussion thread about the topic on the Star Wars Galaxies forums was pushed to 300 pages and almost 7,500 posts on Friday afternoon.