You are here: Despite the additions the game has seen over the years the population has dropped significantly and twelve servers were closed in October 2009. These closures were preceded by a nine month campaign by Sony Online Entertainment to rehouse players of these servers to more populated servers. As these servers' players migrated to other servers the other servers enjoyed greater activity, notably the Starsider server which to this day has become the only server to regularly hit server activity above a "heavy" rating.
After the twelve servers closed and many of their players moved to more active servers there was a spike in activity on half of the major remaining servers. This activity was short lived however, as during 2010 there has been a steady decline in server population leading to petitions across the Star Wars Galaxies Gameplay Forum for further mergers. Additionally, server mergers and recent updates (notably the GCW update) have created severe lag issues, causing more unrest in the community.
On May 17th, SOE released Hotfix 19.17 which introduced the new feature of bounty hunting in space. This allows players to place a bounty on players of the opposite faction who have recently destroyed their ship in space combat. This will allow bounty hunters to pick these targets up as missions and pursue them in space for the monetary reward(up to 1 million credits) the player has placed on the target.
Many players that miss the Pre-CU days, now play on emulators (which are not owned by SOE). SWGEMU.com being one of the more ambitious projects that are currently working to bring the Pre-CU style of Star Wars Galaxies back to its fans. It should be noted the emulator projects are still very much in-development, swg credits with many bugs that existed in the SOE builds still in existence. Low server populations are also an issue with playing the emulated servers. The SWGEMU project has a live test server, and another emulator, SWG ANH, has had a test server running on several occasions. While these projects focus on re-creating Star Wars Galaxies exactly Before the Combat Upgrade patch, other emulator projects, such as SWGCanon.com and darjani.org, change the game of the pre-CU era to suit other players wants with tweaks to skills and game-play.
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