For those of you (and I know there are quite a few) that likes roleplaying, I just want to point out the extreme difference in player style on Anarchy Online and Star Wars Galaxies.
As most of you know I have been playing AO since launch and I more or less quit around July-August -03 to play SWG.
I have never been much of a roleplayer myself allthough I have allways been interested in it. I've found it hard to do on a regurlar basis. Things like creating a background story for the char I'm playing and such has been too much for me to handle. Now and then in AO I tried to RP but as you know, the majority of AO players does not roleplay much. The person I connect roleplay with the most has to be Ketrosteen. He was allmost always IC and it was sometimes hard for me to follow his rp turns.
I never thought it would be much different in SWG, and from the start I more or less played the way I did in AO. I had a pretty slow start in SWG since I've grown used to have a group of players who I knew well and allways could talk to. Coming to the new game, not knowing what to do, having no friends and no group to fall back on was almost terrifying!
So, when not playing the game I searched the web for possible guilds to join or atleast have contact with. That was a more difficult task than I thought it would be. SWG is played over sevral servers andtrying to find guilds playing on the server I was on was harder than expected. Finally I found a website to a group that was divided between SWG and the upcoming Warcraft MMPORG. I applied on the website and got in.
To my surprise when I finally went in to play with these people was that they roleplay. Everyone does! All the time! I must say it brings another dimension to the game itself, and enhances the experience in many ways. SWG, being completely different in many ways towards AO is build around a confligt between two groups, the empire and the rebellion. I have met immense roleplay both in conflicts and in ordinary chattin or even in business.
Being mainly a craftsman I mainly do business with people and I find it very amusing to see that people are actually roleplaying when they are out to buy even the simplest things.
One fun thing with the guild I'm in is that it's a bit different from the normal guilds in SWG and perhaps AO aswell. The most usual thing for a group is to belong to either faction in the conflict at hand. Like in AO you choose wether you are clan, omni or neutral. In SWG you start as neutral and then either chose to go rebel or imperial. You can change back and forth without much trouble and you can decide to be overt or covert in the faction you favour. Usually people in SWG chose their side for their group, stating that they are either a rebel or imperial guild.
My guild is neither of the two. It's build up like a criminal organisation, where we have a kingpin boss and a group of crimelords as "advisors". The rest are either craftsmen or hitmen. The group is a blend of rebels, imperials and neutrals and the main goal is to pick up bounties on people from other guilds, or work as paid mercenaries in guildwars. This direction of play makes the roleplaying part even more enhanced as many of my guildmates are secret murderers, spies and all kinds of other types you can think of in a criminal group. Actually we even have our own village drunk in town.
I have now learned more about roleplaying and I'm IC more than OOC ingame wich is a very big step for me.