Chris "Dotanuki" Field, SOE producer for Star Wars Galaxies, has posted a producer's note where he shares the release of Chapter 11: The Battle of Echo Base "shouldn't be too far off" and confirms there are no current plans to shut down SWG in response to the LucasArts and BioWare announcement of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

I wanted to take this opportunity to reiterate what has already been said by SOE and LucasArts; there are no current plans to shut down Star Wars Galaxies. In fact, SOE has never shut down an MMO. The SWG team remains committed to delivering you high quality updates well into the foreseeable future. We already have rough ideas for what our content will be throughout 2009.

Keep reading below for the full letter, or check it out here.

Hello boys and girls,

I hope you have all been enjoying the Galactic Moon Festival. It was certainly fun to put together and we already have some great ideas on how to expand the event next year! It's been great on this end to see all the different creative ways that the decorations were put to use in the player houses / guild halls.

Of course the big news of late is the Imperial portion of The Battle of Echo Base hitting TCPrime. We appreciate all your testing and feedback on the instance. It was a huge undertaking, bigger than any of us initially anticipated, and we've been really pleased with the warm reception it received. Bug fixing and tuning continues to go well and the Rebel portion of the battle should be up on TCPrime before the end of the day today. I don't have a specific launch date to share for Hoth as a whole though it shouldn't be too far off. Things are looking great; we just want to be sure that the release is as high quality as possible. I do have a couple of things to mention based on the feedback given thus far…

1. The Battle of Echo Base Hologram – There has been a lot of displeasure over the fact that loyal subscribers cannot receive this reward. To help alleviate this we will be altering the item to make it tradable. Furthermore, we intend to make any decorative recapture gifts that come up in the future tradable as well. This keeps the reward enticing to those who may want to return yet it doesn't shut loyal players out from the possibility of ever attaining one.

2. Echo Base Difficulty – There have been reports that the Imperial portion of the Echo Base heroic is too easy. We beg to differ as the logs haven't shown us anybody who has received a flawless victory (or even a "pretty good" victory). Remember, this encounter is bound by the realities of the film. The Imperials always win and the Rebels always lose. Victory in this instance comes in the form of how mercilessly you defeat the Rebels or how much equipment and personnel you manage to evacuate before the Imperials overrun the base. A player with a flawless victory will receive NINE tokens, three for each portion of the battle (battlefield, base interior, and evacuation area). We've seen folks post that the encounter is too easy, yet they only earned one token. Those folks need to keep practicing. For those that do get a flawless victory, you will be awarded a badge and title for your achievement.

In other big news since my last Producer's Note, LucasArts and BioWare have announced Star Wars : The Old Republic. I wanted to take this opportunity to reiterate what has already been said by SOE and LucasArts; there are no current plans to shut down Star Wars Galaxies. In fact, SOE has never shut down an MMO. The SWG team remains committed to delivering you high quality updates well into the foreseeable future. We already have rough ideas for what our content will be throughout 2009.

For the TCG fans out there SOE Denver has another Promo Drop Weekend scheduled for you this weekend. In response to player feedback, we have raised the drop rate of the promo card for this and future promo weekends. While the promo cards won't ever be common, per se, we hope that this gives more players the chance to find these exciting items.

The next update on the horizon is our release of Life Day this December. The giant wroshyr trees will be back, this time in Dearic (Talus), Doaba Goerfel (Corellia), and Wayfar (Tatooine). We have a lot of neat gifts planned for that event, many inspired by the Star Wars Holiday Special. We will also have a new speeder for those that take part in one of our Life Day events.

Finally, I wanted to clarify something about Free CTS and House Pack-Up. The reason that we intend to launch Free CTS before the House Pack-Up event is because we want the people who transfer to be able to participate in this fun (and useful) event on their new server.   We want to give everybody on each server, freshly transferred and otherwise, to have a fair shot at any prime real estate that may be opening up.

I hope everybody has a great Thanksgiving!

-Dotanuki