Not such a long, long time ago, in galaxy much like this one, only more naive, youthful, and able to pull off those jeans the Milky Way no longer has any business shimmying into, Star Wars: The Old Republic was the Next Big Thing. It was billed as a tale for the ages – or six tales for the ages, really. Some soup-tin-sized lightsaber hilts aside, it could do no wrong. Fast-forwarding to today, however, paints a significantly more disenfranchised picture. Where once the level cap was a mystical thing – like the bell at the top of one of those strongman hammer dealies at fairs – now everyone’s dinging it. The credits have rolled, show’s over, and the theater’s empty aside from an incredibly cute cricket and tumbleweed couple in the throes of deep, eerily silent love, right? Wrong. That, lead designer Daniel Erickson told RPS, is a classic case of the Internet’s peanut gallery making a lightspeed jump to conclusions.

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