I finally took the time to read the recent (or not so recent anymore)
announcement on the SWG boards about the list of features they're dropping from the initial release. It took a while because I usually avoid going near those boards like I avoid lodging my penis between a belt sander and a rough piece of wood in desperate need of sanding. You can often tell a lot about an online game by its community, and when checking out potential new games from MPGOD one of the first things I'll do is go to their community forums and have a quick browse. Based on this, SWG is fucked.
Player Cities - I pretty much agree that this is one of the more postponeable things, as after initial release its going to take a little while for people to get to grips with the game, and at least a good few weeks before the usual crowd find ways to cheat / twink and "power level" their way up to a point where the development team have to actually worry about player retention for people who have basically ruined the game for themselves.
Player Vehicles - The rationale behind this is fairly similar to the cities. The stuff coming in the space expansion later on sounded awesome anyway, so it will be nice to have player vehicles whacked in with that one. Obviously the concern is that running about large planets on foot "Totally sucks dude!", which is fair enough, but they seem to imply they've thought about this one.
Player Generated Missions - seems somewhat related to IQ of general player populace, which, we've established runs pretty low on average. So no major loss imo.
Dark Jedi - No doubt various jedi-perma-death announcements will have reduced the population of aspiring jedi, so hopefully the number of people moaning about this one will be reasonably low. In terms of Starwars related realism there were never too many of them about anyway.
I only lasted glancing at a couple of pages of "responses", including the apparently obligitory if completely nonsensical practise of people trying to be "first" to respond, or even on the "first page" etc, but theres some reasonably amusing proof of a few things contained in their responses:
1. The low average level of intelligence posessed by their potential user community.
2. Some people who take the game way to fucking seriously.
3. The effects of a rather brain damaged MTV Generation are starting to become quite apparent in our society, this time manifested by people making comments such as "Wow finally finished reading" (*Note: Not actual quote, spelling mistakes removed for reasons of anal retentiveness) and "Thats the longest post ever!" to a post that took me about 2 minutes to read.
4. They are in desperate need of some real forum moderators (yeah baby I'd love the job, banning smacktards aint no thang to me)
While the level of indignation from a lot of people is quite high, in general it sounds like theres nothing majorly important thats been postponed. However to someone whos been through this scenario before, you have to wonder how ready and polished this game is going to be when it's finally released. No doubt they have a lot of backlash to fear from their community (*cough* of smacktards *cough*) if they end up delaying things any further, but in the long run it might well be worth it. Personally, I'm thinking of waiting - partly this is forced due to geographical reasons (and the fact that NZ ISPs are quite useless, I need to be back in London to play any of these sorts of games seriously), but partly I'm sick of being on the bleeding edge of these things, and I seriously get the feeling that anyone who can bear to wait a few months will be rewarded by a game with a bit more stability, more features, and maybe a few less of the 'tards.
Until then, I'm keeping myself happy with re-runs of this.