The history of this game is a bit tragic.

First and foremost it's pretty damn good. I personally found all the main stories engaging for each class. So much so that I played each one. Certainly some of the best storylines I've experienced in MMOs to date.

Side quests/stories are kind of blah, but I've not really played an MMO in which that wasn't the case.

The PVP was the most surprisingly impressive part of the game I enjoyed. Huttball is pretty unique to PVP in an MMO, and subverts your expectation of that experience in a great way. After enjoying the main stories, PVP gave the game staying power that I didn't expect it would have.

The best thing about it is that it really nails the Star Wars aesthetic, feel, and universe. When you charge into battle as a Sith Marauder you feel like the class you're playing in a visceral way. The same is true for most classes. I played a Sith Assassin mostly, and the experience is gloriously devious, sneaky, and lethal.

I believe the downsides to this game primarily came from EA being at the helm. The game has been plagued by problems of various severity for long periods of time. For example, it is created on the Hero Engine which can cause performance issues that will simply never be addressed because it would require an overhaul of the entire engine. They don't have intentions of funding what would be this massive undertaking.

EA is content to sell cosmetics through microtransactions and not ensure expansions are up to the quality they need to be for the asking price. I'm fairly certain their policy is to maintain an adequate player base that still makes the game reasonably profitable through microtransactions without devoting much attention to significant development of the game. They have no ambition to grow the player base significantly or improve the game similarly.

I get it. MMOs take a ton of investment to be successful and profitable, and that's tough to do with strong competition out there. However, as a player I didn't force them to compete in the arena of MMOs. They made that decision knowing the risk I'd assume.

It's a good game, but it's been pretty much relegated to the "maintenance mode" of development. EA isn't willing to invest much further in this game.

The good news is the base game is free at this point, and EA relaxed a lot of the restrictions that were initially placed on F2P players. It's a good time to experience what it did well without sinking money into it unless you want to.

Here's me and a friend with our two stealth classes that we had some great times with.