John Smedley, President of Sony Online, has officially addressed the Combat Upgrade Petition (Currently at over 15,000 signatures) in a post I have to respect him for - if for no other reason that he posted his e-mail address. The post can be viewed on the official SWG Forums, and is copied below.

Hello Everyone,

We realize that the recent Combat Upgrade has caused quite a stir. Yes, we've seen the petition. Yes, we're reading your emails very carefully.. in fact I've responded to many of you personally. From our perspective the Combat Upgrade was a crucial thing for us to do for the long term health of the game. In order to make the experience in SWG more diverse and to breathe new life into this game we felt it was important for us to entirely overhaul the current system and to make sure that it's balanced properly. Are we finished? Not by a longshot... by doing this what we've effectively done is to provide a new baseline to add a lot of new content into the game in a very short time, and to make sure that the professions really mean something in the game. We recognize there are problems that have arisen from this, and what I'd like to ask your help in doing is to target these problems so that we can knock them down very quickly. As you've seen in the last few days, the team is working tirelessly towards fixing any problems that have arisen.. and with your help we're confident we can get the rest of them taken care of as well.

Please understand that we love this game too.. our goal wasn't to upset the existing userbase.. but we do recognize that changing a game does inherently mean some people aren't going to like that change. What we're trying to do is to insure that we can accomplish a lot of what you've all been asking us to do (things like Galactic Civil War) in really cool and meaningul ways.. and frankly speaking, we just couldn't do that with the old combat system in place.

What would really help us is to give us ideas on how we can improve the new system and cool things you would like to see us do in the near term. We aren't going back to the old system, but with your help I'm confident in a few weeks you're going to feel this was the right call. Obviously you are our customers, and you pay the bills around here... we're trying to make changes that are going to make your experience better in the long run. Please bear with us while we make that effort, and give us a little time to respond and address your concerns.

Thanks a lot,

John Smedley
President, Sony Online Entertainment
jsmedley@soe.sony.com