Im going to have to say not making fair sets(other). Just think about it. The reason no one plays OR is instead of making cool OR pieces(and there are plenty)is because we have countless repeats of LEIA!!!!! and FREAKING 4pt BATTLE DROIDS(There are TEN). Instead of making a set with 4 or 5 characters of most factions Wizards dumps their FORTY! spots on Battle droids and Storm Troopers!!!! I am going to start buying Lottery tickets and try to get into the World tour of Poker as soon as I turn 18 so I can restart the game and make it to please the Players.

I picked other before reading through and thought Bill hit the nail on the head with his 8 point description. And this with a new squirt about.

GOWK pre-erratta

It seems that every team Uses GM or Evade. Wish there was an ability to effectively stymie them. You can't say Disruptive either. Nym costs to much and Juno and Deena get destroyed every time I use them. HA HA

IMO, the 60-40 piece set thing was kinda lame. It made trading a bit harder. For instance, I don't have alot of $$ to spend on minis, so, I got the stuff I needed, by trading other people stuff they needed at my lgs. But when they get everything they need from one case, I have nothing to offer.

I think the death of SWM was a bit of a process that had a lot of things that eventually caused it. To say that one or another had more of an impact is hard to say, but there are a few that happened that could be singled out and probably one or two that could be considered the final straw.

I think its best to work on a timeline of events, and please excuse me if there were earlier problems I only started with Universe.

One of earliest, and to me one that seemed to start things off was SWM post Champions, i.e. Bounty Hunters. The set overall was probably one of the weakest sets, not only was it a Huge Set, but it also had one of the worst balances in terms of faction support. Over half of the set was fringe, and several of those fringe were characters people didn't really know or care about (though if you know people who genuinely cared for Ayy Vida and BoShek as characters, my apologies). I know the LGS I worked for at the time sold out of 56 cases of CoTF in 1 weekend, but had a backlog of BH for over a year. Not to say the set didn't have really good figures, but overall the set was not that great.

The second major blow was what happened after BH. Mainly, nothing for about 8-9 months until A&E came out. Over that period of time following a relatively lackluster set pretty much killed the game where I played. By the time A&E came out we went from having 12-20 players in a tournament to 8-12 (and sometimes less). Of course there was a bit of controversy with A&E as well. But the set as a whole wasn't bad and offered some pretty cool pieces as well.

I think one of the next major problems was the other games WoTC was producing (Hecatomb, DreamBlade) which drew support and funds away from more successful games and cost WoTC a lot of money when they failed).

Along the same vein the lack of real advertising and the withdraw of prize support definitely hurt the game. Especially in areas where one or two players won every week. Which meant the other players were paying to enter a tournament that they never got anything out of. At least the prize support helped to give something to the players for their trouble.

After all of that I think the game was fairly hurt by the time FU came along as yet another Huge set, which made it much more expensive to collect the pieces. And by this time the game was probably not selling as well as WotC had hoped. Especially since RotS had been out of theaters for a long time. The overall interest in Star Wars was likely dropping on a global scale. And this meant that the license wasn't nearly as valuable as it had been, even though WotC was still paying it.

By this point I really have to wonder if WotC was still interested in SWM at all, and if they were just looking for a way of dropping the product and decided to go with the 40 minis sets, which killed a lot of the collectibility and made it way too easy to get the rares and very rares. You only needed to buy 1 case and do some trading to get almost any piece you could want. And of course, a number of the pieces in these sets were reprints (some of pieces that really didn't need to be reprinted).

But I think the thing that was probably the last straw and what caused WotC to just drop the product was GoWK. It was a controversial piece that ended up getting banned from the game, which caused a major devision in the fan base, and it really seemed to unbalance the game, especially when the FAQ came out. I have a feeling this was when WotC made their decision to end the game, fire Rob and bring in Peter to finish things out.

Overall a mess of WotC's own design. blasted shame too.

As part of the "custom stat" community, which is where his comment is directed at, he is quite right. Just look at the custom sets that are on the custom tab. Hell, there are a few of mine that after a few more look throughs are probably pushing the power level, and undercosted.

To compare most peoples custom stats to stuff designed and put through a playtesting system is absurd.

I voted other, I agree with Bill's reply. Related to that I think only about 50% of customs are generally crap. :P

crap = undercosted, broken, strange new abilities