I got to admit, Yoshi-P mentioning he played Star Wars: Galaxies and name dropping the NGE threw me. If he knows SWG he should have no excuse for the lack of real MMO social features in FFXIV.
To be fair - but the social features from SWG are gone and won't come back.
Discord/PSN/Steam/Xbox Live soaks up a lot of the social space that MMOs used to fill prior and they aren't going away. There isn't a dev space in modern games for SWG style content that virtually no one will ever interact with (ex - two different people running for Mayor in a player city).
Galaxies was a very differently made game and was also around at a very different time in MMO/Internet history.
Going off of raw sub numbers is a bit of a misnomer. There was a lot of...interesting...stuff in there. I never really played it, but people still gush about the crafting system in the same way people sperg about City of Heroes customization options. It also had some real dogshit things going on (Jedi) along with funny incidents, like GMs teleporting players into space because they were protesting in game.
When people talk about SWG being good, it's pre-Jedi.
SWG started off as a very community focused game and (tried) to keep that process through it's various designs and accomplished some amazing things that will, frankly, never even be attempted again.
- Almost the entire economy was player-generated. There were super-specific hyper rare once-in-a-life time drops from endgame mobs - but generally any piece of gear worth having was player-made. Made from materials gathered from players, that enable other players to get different sets of materials and so on. All world materials were dynamic and changed every few weeks, and crafting was complex and different items needed different aspects of different materials (guns might need metal with a high conductivity, melee weapons would need metal with high sturdiness - and every metal had randomized stats and would get cycled out every month). This fed into literally every single item in the game.
- The economy was also built for scale. Mining starts out with "press mine button to mine" but progresses to let you build various levels of automation until you're dropping down 10 gigantic powered harvesters sucking up hundreds of times of what you're capable of by yourself per minute. Crafters could make single items, but could also make blueprints that they could load into factories and make them by the hundreds - automatically. There was a normal Auction House but crafters could also stock NPC merchants with items to be sold directly to other players.
- To facilitate this - the various planets were fully realized and to-scale spaces. They were huge with very empty sections where in players could drop down their buildings, harvesters; factories, and player housing. Players could make outposts, guild halls, shopping malls, even entire towns. In later patches, towns could elect Mayors and large enough towns could elect to become Fast Travel points like "real" cities.
and that's just the tip of the iceberg, but SWG was one of the most player/social MMOs to ever exist.
