Earlier this afternoon, Star Wars Galaxies rogue server SWG Legends hosted a massive event called SOEclipse, essentially the precise moment when the Legends Omega server has officially been alive longer than the original live servers under SOE. Players were invited to log in and join the devs in Cloud City for the festivities, countdown, and swag – including a badge, commendations, and a level 90 booster.
With rewards like those, I expected to see a lot of folks online, but nothing prepared me for the reality, as even a half an hour before the event, hundreds of people had converged on the Legends Cantina in Cloud City on Bespin and player concurrency had already outstripped the game’s prior COVID-era peak. I couldn’t even get one of my toons into the Cloud City zone because it capped out so quickly, and the devs started diverting players to the other capitals (Mos Eisley, Theed, and Coronet) to spread out the load.
Now, I’ve been playing SWG and its emus for a long time, and I can say I’ve never seen so many people in Star Wars Galaxies in 21 years – not on live and definitely not on an emulator. I don’t remember even the sunset party in 2011 being this packed, and this was packed in four places. I watched it keep soaring upward. 2400. 2500. 2600. 2700. By the time the countdown finished, 2856 people were logged into the server awaiting their rewards, a massive new concurrency peak for the rogue server.
I popped characters in Cloud City, Eisley, and Coronet to snap some pics of the insanity, plus I managed to grab a few in Theed too. I took video, but it was literally a slideshow. It was like walking through pudding, and this being an online game, some folks were clowning to make it worse with officer airdrops, entertainer smoke bombs, force lighting, and at one point, a pet graul stomping through the melee – just like old times, really. At one point, a player started shouting “Ewok pets or we riot!” – an idle threat, given how nobody could move let alone start a revolution.
The actual “eclipse” was a bit anticlimactic given it was just a countdown, but that didn’t stop everyone present in all three locations where I was from shouting their glee.
And then, just as gamers were predicting in Discord, the server went boom, most likely because people had started to log in their alts to go for the second round, too many all at once for the hamsters to handle.
SWGL’s community rep Vincer told fans in Discord that the server’s live event attendee record – from earlier this summer – was 295 players. All four of the cities with live events this round far outstripped that figure by themselves, totaling 1797 players at the events (rather than somewhere else in the game). And yes, that’s players/accounts, not characters.
Not too shabby for an MMORPG that technically died for SWTOR at the end of 2011, eh?
As I type this, the server is back up, and while your moment to get a free level 90 token is over, you can still pick up a badge. As Vincer put it, the solution to the overcrowding on Bespin – i.e., opening the event in three other cities – created the problem of overcrowding on the server as a whole, so the team will be re-running the badge handouts at the other events going on this week for folks who still want the badges on their alts.
