You call it bashing. I call it expressing my own personal experience. SWG was the worst I've ever seen a video game company treat it's customers. I personally witnessed it as a paying participant.

They had to reboot the server every night because their code was so bad.

They promised all kinds of changes, from product updates to improved communication. Not only did they lie about the changes, they screwed many people in the process.

Even in the beta, many people told them the game was not ready and they launched anyways. They told people the bugs would be fixed before launch. Even from the start they lied, because those bugs were never fixed.

They treated their customers like dirt and you expect me to kiss their ass? Hell no.

More or less.  I'm glad you asked. 

Companies that screw over their most loyal customers deserve criticism. Or does SOE have some kind of immunity no matter how badly they treat paying customers?

It's not like I'm making any of this up, do a google search and you will find words much more harsh than anything I'm saying. The game has 279 one star reviews on Amazon. That must be some kind of record.

Actually there are an additional 444 one star reviews that I didn't notice in my first search. 

I played EQ, SWG, EQ2. Each time I eventually I got sick of paying $15 every month and an additional $50 every 6 months for essentially required expansions for a game that kept breaking and having radical crappy changes.

Their concept/design team seems to be pretty good 'cause all the games start off well (especially the first EQ) or have good potential, but eventually they just get ruined by the (completely separate) post-launch management teams.

So this apparently god awful SOE is getting a slew of extremely talented developers and coders and we want to make this a bad thing o.o?

Apparently, although I do have a correction: only 2 mods.

Look, it's just a flat out lie to say SOE was the sole reason that WoW was successful.  Not only does that give no credit to Blizzard that has been releasing hit games since the SNES, but it completely disregards all the other MMOs that got completely trounced by WoW.  There are a lot of them, you know?

SOE has more than just 3, as well.

A bad experience on 1 or 2 games doesn't mean they suck.  I know they had problems, starting with the ridiculously bad launch where no one could get online because they didn't anticipate so many people (even though it was online online....ugh).  That just happened to Nintendo's network because of Brawl, too, so that still happens.

I'm not saying SWG is defendable, but it's not the only game and they have done some great things to advance the genre.  Hopefully this movie will improve things.

2 mods who happen to have bad personal experiences with them, so not trying to claim it's some kind of universal thing. :P I'm serious about the two separate development teams though -- the A team creates the game and the B team maintains it afterward. Hopefully SCEI can straighten them out.

So Blizzard sucks, too?  They charge $15 a month (btw, I played EQ1, and it was never that much...it was $9.89 if you only payed 1 month at a time with discounts for more...I believe it was 9.89 because it was under 989 studios at the time).  I'm pretty sure no expansion was $50, either.  I know Kunark wasn't.  I stopped playing after that, but no one charges $50 for expansions.

The completely seperate post-launch teams is probably because the main developers create expansions or other games and it's maintained by other guys.  That situation could be fixed with this merger.