Smuggler Archive
Thread: should old acquaintance be forgot....
"As an example of where we are wrestling with this in Star Wars Galaxies--we have several very large overlapping constituencies of likely players. One, for example, is all those players who want to be Jedi. And Jedi, frankly, crush everything else in the setting. Then there's all these players who want to be melee fighters. All those who want to be Rebels and Imperials.
In the movies, the Rebels win by luck and pluck. It's not surprising that many players want to play Rebels. They are also all continuity fanatics, and keep insisting that everything be as like the movies as possible. If it were, the Rebels would wink out of existence in the first week the servers went live. We as designers feel an imperative to supply balance there simply because otehrwise, a major attractant to the game goes away.
On the other hand, we're just plain giving up on the issue of melee combat. A good ranged guy is always gonna take a good close quarters guy, and there's no getting past that. Yes, we've innvested a fair amount of time in vibroblades and stun poles and what have you, and there's skills to learn for melee, motioan captured moves, and all sorts of goodness. But really, we already know the min-maxers won't use that stuff. So it's there for those whose self-image really calls for it.
Lastly, there's those pesky Jedi. They're barely balanceable. So we're making them extremely rare (and no, I'm not going to say how, not even here. 
and we're going ahead and giving them the power. They're gonna be superbeings, and if you see one, run."
More to follow, if you have your own quotes from the development days, feel free 
so about the vehicles... many people have come up with ideas for a vehicle revamp, including myself. and some have proposed a whole new profession to make vehicles, which would be similar to Shipwright. of course vehicle crafting and the whole vehicle system would become more similar to ships too.
My Vehicle Revamp Ideas
and this part seems to be more true in the post-CU environment:
"On the other hand, we're just plain giving up on the issue of melee combat. A good ranged guy is always gonna take a good close quarters guy, and there's no getting past that. Yes, we've innvested a fair amount of time in vibroblades and stun poles and what have you, and there's skills to learn for melee, motioan captured moves, and all sorts of goodness. But really, we already know the min-maxers won't use that stuff. So it's there for those whose self-image really calls for it.
Lastly, there's those pesky Jedi. They're barely balanceable. So we're making them extremely rare (and no, I'm not going to say how, not even here. and we're going ahead and giving them the power. They're gonna be superbeings, and if you see one, run."
so that's nice that ranged finally got it's due. and jedi will probably be a lot harder to earn, and to keep.
it's just too bad they abandoned the idea of alternate, multiple paths of progression, and the idea of aquiring more skills rather than bigger numbers
(but at least skills mean more than numbers in PvP now).