It’s a flashback episode today, and not even about World of Warcraft, but gather round anyway as we travel back, back, back…

It was the heady days of early Star Wars: Galaxies. Combat was still delightfully anarchic, spaceships hadn’t been invented, and even land speeders and player towns were still on the ‘Coming Soon’ list. I’d been playing for about a month, going through the usual early ‘first go’ incarnation – the one where you make all the crippling development mistakes while still coming to terms with stuff like ‘Walk Forward’, ‘Attack’ and the like.

I’d had my heart set on being a Droid Engineer, one of the most ‘SciFi’ professions available in a setting which is basically little more than Cowboys vs Samurai, with magic and Space Nazis thrown in. I was soon let down, as I discovered that no-one actually bought droids, because they were rubbish compared to Creature Tamer Pets – why take a Probe Droid when you can have (multiple) Rancors? That subsequently got nerfed, but Droid Engineer has never really shined as a career choice. I picked Architect instead and got to work grinding.

Then they opened a new server – a European one. I generally prefer European servers where available, purely for the lower ping timer, which can be as much as 150ms less if the hardware is on the same continent as me. But also, I wanted to see what life was like ‘at the start’ of a game world. I’m glad I did, as just for a moment – brief period of perhaps a month, I saw for the first time, how these wretched games are meant to be played.

Now it’s worth mentioning that in SWG there are no NPC vendors. Absolutely every item on the Bazaar, or on Player Vendors, was made by another player, or looted, and frankly the loot is in most cases absolutely worthless, and most definitely nowhere near the effectiveness of even practice grind playermades. On a normal server, with chronic mudflation, duping problems, massive overproduction and rampant lowballing, this is largely irrelevant to the shopper; they just see loads of cheap stuff for sale, but on the New Server…there was absolutely nothing for sale at all.

Every player who picked Artisan as a starter profession began life with a ‘Generic Crafting Tool’, and a ‘Mineral Survey Tool’ which also allowed mining of small amounts, and that was it – from these simple tools, an entire economy would have to be raised. It sounded like a unique opportunity, and I seized it. To further increase the whole Pioneering spirit, I moved to one of the most backwater and most tenuously StarWarsey planets I could find, rather than Corellia, Tatooine or Naboo, the usual player hubs, then picked the most out of the way city to move to, and got to work.

Using the built-in, but much neglected Planetary Chat channel, and by being uncharacteristically forward with passers-by in that town, we managed to get together something of a community, and by that I mean a real one, untainted by guild or faction or end-game raiding or politics or clique. We were just a group of people who all happened to have chosen Backwater to start life in. Many of them were disgruntled players from overcrowded and top-heavy other servers looking for exactly what I had found – a quiet, rustic and innocent lifestyle, online.

We chatted, compared notes and helped each other out with some of the more arduous initial infrastructure work – in particular, the manufacture of the first mineral harvester. SWG folks take those for granted of course, and they are ridiculously cheap for even the high yield ones, but imagine having to pull together the minerals for one single wind turbine, using only the Mineral Survey Tool’s ‘sample’ mode – perhaps 10 units of material every 3-4 seconds, for several thousand units. The very first harvesters in Backwater were quite literally collaborative efforts – we all dug up a few hundred units of material each, and threw them into the pile. That none of us then just robbed everyone else, is a testament to the spirit of the time – it simply never occurred to anyone.

The combat folks helped too – several of the approaches to Backwater were prone to wandering lethal agro mobs, and could sometimes lead to entries or exits being impassable for lowbie or non-combat people. A few simple requests on the Planet Chat would be all that was needed for a posse to form, and run that varmint out of town. And of course, we'd make them the tools of their, and every other, trade as needed. The more ancillary functions, such as Entertainer (then quite necessary), and Medic were picked up as needed, and again, a shout on Planet Chat would quickly get the required service staffed.

We even did day trips…one particular hunting expedition saw around twenty of us, of varying degrees of combat incompetence, rampaging around the outskirts of Backwater, causing all manner of self-inflicted chaos, while the career combat and medical professionals shepherded us along in good-natured bemusement. The Cantina, normally a place of AFK Dance-bots and preening drama-queens, felt more like the bar in ‘Cheers’ than anything else – people in and out all evening, and everyone really did know your name. Visitors from the more popular core worlds were often so startled by this unexpected Utopia that they often stayed for good.

Of course nothing lasts forever, and our own paradise suffered two distinct events that ultimately ended the dream, forever. First came player housing. Player housing in SWG is usually cheap, abundant and elaborate, but in Backwater, we were still scrabbling the minerals together to make mining machinery, let alone palatial dwellings, so it took some time to get that far for us. That point did come however, and before long, a new village had sprung up, just outside Backwater. I wouldn’t want to deny anyone the rewards of progress, but I’ve often thought that the soul went out of Backwater when people no longer had to live there.

Certainly the essential services remained in town – banks, cantinas, starport, etc, but there was a definitely diffusion after the houses started showing up. Many of us opted to build in the same place, but some felt that to be too restrictive, or didn’t like the site. For whatever reason, our honest open community started to clique up at that point – the Villagers, and the Hermits. Not that there was any specific conflict mind you, but it was never quite the same after that.

Around this time, Landspeeders showed up. We all helped each other get mobile and started going on those really long, but quick, tours of the world that made a total mockery of any place in SWG being any distance away from anywhere else, and generally had fun. Some people couldn’t wait their turn for their own speeders though and went off-world to get them, and so began a growing awareness that although we were simple and happy, the rest of the game was actually doing much better than us. In the space of a month or so, Corellia, Tatooine and Naboo, through just sheer force of numbers had finished their economic start-ups and now looked for all intents and purposes, just like any long running server – you could buy it all, find training in abundance, and so on.

Many of the Pioneers began to spend a lot of time off-world after that. Certainly their hearts were always in Backwater, but increasingly their bodies weren’t. Why struggle to build a house here when there are hundreds for bargain prices one starport away? We became less driven by the Amish-style barn-raisings, and more by personal hobbies and drives – I want to Master my profession…I want to travel the galaxy, all aspirations that many of us had come to the new server to free ourselves from. The sun had begun to set on Backwater.

The next problem was the second great disruption; Player Cities. I was beginning to have reservations at that point, but many of the others in the Village clique wanted something more formal, more concrete. So we set out scouting parties, and found a site, some considerable distance from Backwater and the Village, and threw up a Town Hall. Then the whole thing changed. For a town to grow, it needs declared residents, and unless the town grows to a certain rank, it is unable to add a shuttle port. This meant a long period of being extremely isolated from the rest of the game. Landspeeders helped, certainly, but on the whole, most ‘residents’ preferred to have access to facilities, rather than standing around in a housing estate in the middle of nowhere. I became heavily involved in the construction of the buildings, and an RL friend ended up as its Mayor, and the next few weeks drove me from the game, burnt-out, and he followed not long after.

Once the town hall was placed, the experience changed totally. It became about bodies, not people as we desperately tried to find just anyone to place a house, (which we would give away for free), declare as resident, and then we’d leave them to it and move on to the next recruit. There was a time when I knew everyone; by the time I burnt out, I would be hard placed to recognise maybe six people a town of 50 or more, just bodies, most of whom simply left the house declared as residence, and then went off to more interesting planets to actually live.

The final straw was when two guilds placed Guild Houses in the town. By necessity, two guilds in the same town are going to end up in competition for recruits among the populace, and perhaps rightly, will want a say in how the town is run, in particular the whole Rebel vs Imperial thing, which we had always tried to avoid. From its egalitarian, yet hopelessly optimistic founding, the town had reverted to every other outback settlement – strictly a guild affair. I left at that point, and deleted the character.

I returned, in another incarnation, some months ago, and found only one house in the place where we built, everything else having been long abandoned and rotted away. One house to mark the grave of a dream, and the memory of one special and unique episode on my ongoing pilgrimage.

I helped my friend move all the furniture out, and pack it up, and now there stands only windblown grass, and a gently sloping hillside. People come and go, but the worlds continue…