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Check out http://www.swgemu.com/ if you hadn't noticed it exists. You need your old install disks, but its free, and its SWG as of Patch 14.1 - or will be once they are done rewriting it. Currently much of it exists and is functioning, and its receiving regular improvements.

If they could combine the sandbox elements of a game like SWG with the combat and Realm vs Realm of Dark Age of Camelot, they might have a real winner on their hands. This game is being developed by folks that worked on DAOC so its a good start - but it might be merely a third attempt to revive the popularity and loyalty of that title, which they failed to do with Warhammer Online.
With WAR they failed because they over-engineered it I think, and their design relied too much on PvP at all levels, when players progress up in levels and leave the lower levels behind. If you don't have a steady stream of new players coming in, its going to start falling apart. WAR had a few faults that drove me and my friends away from it, but this TESO looks like they are directly trying to recreate the same sort of design as DAOC.

As for Sandbox games it would be great to see that sort of design return to the MMO world. Everyone focusing on trying to out-WOW WOW meant the industry gave up on Sandbox designs entirely. They lost a lot of dedicated players that way I think. When you play a game that is highly immersive, you gain an attachment to characters that is much more pronounced than when you just rollup "Gunnar FuckYuUp", picking his class based on what is the easiest to level and most overpowered in the endgame, pick his equipment based on what is the nastiest stuff you can get, and then go do an endless series of quests/raids etc just to get all the accolades required to make you as overpowered as possible so you never face a challenge.

Star Wars Galaxies was a great game in its first itteration, with a tremendous ambition behind its design. It had a lot of strengths and although not without fault, it was generally a great example of the MMO - until subsequent developers got ahold of it and driven headlong by the beancounters screaming "why don't we have WOW like subscription numbers?", changed the game to make it worse, then changed it further to make it the worse design possible.
(As an aside, if you still have your install disks for SWG, check out http://www.swgemu.com/ - you can play the old game as of patch 14.1, legally. Its still in development, and a lot of things are not working yet but it is playable).

DAOC had the best online community I have ever seen in an MMO. I played on the RP PvP servers (mostly Percival in Midgard Realm but also on the other 2 servers in Albion and Hibernia). The design let you pick whether or not you wanted to be engaging in PvP (visit the frontier zones) or strictly PvE (stay in your realm zones). It had a decent quest system - although typical of the repetitive design of that generation, it had decent raids (although again limited by the level of typical development at the time. Things have changed since).
It had the best PvP in the form of Realm Versus Realm combat - and I recall many very memorable events - sieges that lasted days, Relic raids that were planned 2 weeks in advance and then carried out with lightening precision, real pride in being part of one's realm etc.

I doubt you can ever go back truly but it will be interesting to see them try. I am sure I will give it a shot when it comes out. I miss Midgard immensely, and Ebonheart looks very close in a lot of ways :P

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Maybe you will. I sure as hell won't, because I won't buy a game that uses DRM like that on general principle. I don't care how awesome it is - my life will not be duller or less meaningful if I never play it.
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That's quite an extreme position to take - I take the more moderate view that I will buy it only once there is a DRM-free version available to download. In fact, I have a number of PC games where I bought the game but it remains in its cellophane wrapper, because I never actually installed it from the DRM-ridden DVD. I would never buy a Ubisoft game, for example, unless there was a working, DRM-free version available online.

In terms of false activation servers, you don't need to wait 20 years because that already happens, e.g.
http://arcemu.org/ - world of warcraft
http://www.runuo.com/home/ - ultima online
http://segs.sourceforge.net/ - city of heroes (in development)
http://site.swgemu.com/forums/index.php - star wars galaxies
http://www.eqemulator.org/ - everquest
http://sourceforge.net/projects/evemu/ - eve online

http://forum.ragezone.com/f168/ - many more

In fact, I put something like that together myself for a small indie game that required internet access to run. Monitored requests / responses, replicated the functionality of the server locally and just redirected the server address to localhost using the hosts file. Didn't even need to read any assembly language.

Important note: depending on your jurisdiction, contributing to the development of or even using some or all of the above server emulators may be illegal / against the terms of service for the relevant game.

So I used to play an online game with some friends called Star Wars Galaxies (SWG). Which is now seemingly forever dead. And so the fans decided to work on building their own servers with the given clients. You seem to know a lot about reverse engineering so my question -- when applied more broadly -- is simply this: how come I shelled out $50 for a piece of software back in the day, now that software can no longer be used and that's completely legal? I realize I probably agreed to a ToS that forfeited my right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but I thought consumer protection groups were supposed to prevent this exact sort of thing from happening. Last part of this question is simply do you ever foresee SWG becoming public domain? Of course, it's mired in Lucas' copyrights as well as Sony's but at some point in the distant future, all that copyrighted stuff (including server code and artwork) is supposed to be public domain, right? What then? Is that even going to happen? Is Sony legally required to hang on to that server source code so that I can finally once again play SWG while watching Matlock in the nursing home? Why are consumer rights non-existent when it comes to software? Will the Library of Congress open up all that source? Source control history included? I know I'll probably be dead but I'm curious.

pre NGE SWG

they've had star wars galaxies free shard pre-nge rules up for quite a while and is very successful.

Already been done, for the MMO. They're also making is better, by not adding the game-killing idiot-friendly "upgrades" that SOE added. See SWGEmu.
Not sure about the TCG. A "digital TCG" is utterly stupid, IMNSHO.

A group has been working on re creating the orignal SWG (haven't check on the project since last spring), but I would play it again in a heartbeat.

There are actually a few groups trying that.

I'm not affiliated with the devs of SWGEmu, but I have been monitoring their progress as a member for some time now.

They've got a working game, and a lot of passion, but not much free-time to work on it. Check it out if you've still got your old disks!

There is one project called SWGEmu that is based on Star Wars Galaxies PreCU. It is the old version of Star Wars Galaxies and it is an open source server replacement for the original Star Wars Galaxies server.

It is rare to see such a project, and it is still under development, but has a lot of promises. The Star Wars Galaxies client CD-ROM costs $10 these days and one needs the original client to hook up to this new server.

The same could be done for Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault and others but it would take a lot of beta testing to make sure it is done right.

There is one project called SWGEmu that is based on Star Wars Galaxies PreCU. It is the old version of Star Wars Galaxies and it is an open source server replacement for the original Star Wars Galaxies server.

It is rare to see such a project, and it is still under development, but has a lot of promises. The Star Wars Galaxies client CD-ROM costs $10 these days and one needs the original client to hook up to this new server.

The same could be done for Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault and others but it would take a lot of beta testing to make sure it is done right.

To all of you die-hard Pre-CU SWGW vets, there's an open source SWG emulator project in the works, re-creating Pre-CU as we as we knew it years ago. You can read all about the project at http://swgemu.com/ If you want, you can install SWG from your old CDs, install the EMU files, then log into their public test center to play and test out the game. Progress on the EMU may come to a screeching halt if a (good) KOTOR MMO does come out, but it's always good to have a fallback plan, just in case ;)

If the book is as good as he boasts, it ought to do well.

Reminds me of KotOR in a way, with a WoW twist. Now if we could just get that adapted into a newer version of SWG, we might have something that people enjoy playing again. Otherwise, it's back to waiting for SWGemu to progress a bit further.

I don't think that allowing people to be jedi was the mistake, but making it too easy to be a jedi is. When I played, being a jedi wasn't what drew people to the game. And the people that wanted to play SWG just to be a jedi left pretty quickly, which weeded out a lot of idiots. Granted many people wanted to be a jedi, but doesn't everyone want to be a level 60 character in WoW? I agree that they should have picked a better time period if they wanted to stay cannon with lots of jedis. What you need to realize is that some people don't play Star Wars games just to be jedis. If they stuck to lore, then people didn't like the game. That is not true. People did like the game. Then SOE changed it and lost a very large portion of its player base. As far as I know, it is the only game that has an active community (http://www.swgemu.com/) attempting to change it back to its original state, not because they just want to run and control their own servers, but because the original version was significantly better than its current version.