Players of Star Wars Galaxies’ Legends server were startled last night by an announcement that ripped the lid off some brewing – and ancient – drama in the SWG emulation community.
“[W]e’ve confirmed that Levarris, aka levarrishawk from r/swg, used AI tools to decrypt our client side game asset files,” the SWGL devs wrote. “This gave him access to assets from all of our custom content: items, questlines, and even Bespin. We do know that he’s actively offered these files to other servers, and while we can’t confirm that he’s had any takers yet, if you start seeing Legends‑exclusive content out in other worlds it was likely taken from us. […] We’re obviously bothered by this, but there isn’t much we can do outside of being upfront with all of you and staying focused on what makes Legends great[.]”
The devs do say that no player data was accessed, that it was “strictly client side game asset files,” but that doesn’t take the sting out of the theft, since as far as most players are concerned, what separates the many SWG rogue servers out there is the custom work done by the volunteers on each server – including content like Bespin, which was developed fully by players long after the game was sunsetted in 2011. There’s also little recourse for the team; since all of these servers are emulators for a long-dead MMORPG with an IP currently held by Disney, there’s no legitimate legal solution that wouldn’t blow up all of the projects by drawing too much attention to all of them.
The accused person, Levarrishawk, isn’t a random person; he’s actually a mod on the SWG subreddit, and this morning as I was writing this article, he put up a lengthy post not just admitting to the crime but essentially blaming it on a 14-year-old grudge between emulator teams.
In his story, he claims that 14 years ago, the future leadership of SWG Legends tricked a former SOE developer into handing over the NGE dev tools, which said leadership did not then share with the community group trying to recreate the NGE version of the game from scratch, which he says “undermined” the from-scratch project’s work. (It sounds like these tools were separate from the NGE source code, which was leaked later, but the story elides that.) He then accuses 2026 SWG Legends of being “hypocritical” for being upset that people stole their custom work, and he attempts to justify his theft because like other NGE servers, Legends uses the leaked SOE NGE code.
“SWG Legends, built their server and work on the backs of the Sony Online Entertainment developers who came before them and they stole from to create the ‘Omega Server’. They didn’t spend tireless hours reverse engineering, writing code and figuring out how to build their own. They found it, like a vacant building they chose to squat in, all they had to do was figure out where the light switches were in a manner of speaking. For a project team that is entirely built upon Stolen goods to be so angry and hurt over client data files they encrypted to try to prevent others from stealing is both laughable and extremely hypocritical. Which brings us to exactly why I did it. Hypocrisy at it’s finest, shown a mirror to examine themselves with. You can’t steal someone’s house, change the locks and expect to be safe and sound when someone comes with the means to pick or destroy the lock altogether. It was never your house, it never belonged to you.”
He concludes his manifesto with, “P.S. Synge sends his regards,” which I assume is a Mafia 2 reference or possibly a Game of Thrones reference but either way demonstrates the level of pettiness at play here.
Of course, if you take one more step backward, none of this really makes any sense because every single one of these servers is using IP and client assets they legally have no right to, not just Legends. Many of these servers can and do share assets with each other, and most of the people building assets in 2026 have nothing at all to do with conflicts from 14 years ago and certainly didn’t deserve to have their modern work stolen. And as I hope your moms always told you, two wrongs don’t make a right.
But I can tell you from my own decades of emulator experience that some of these devs absolutely believe their cause and method for restoring dead MMOs is the righteous one and everyone else is a dirty sell-out, which pretty much just looks like weird niche drama to objective observers. In fact, our readers might recall that the whole reason we started calling these projects rogue servers starting in 2019 is that the code-rebuild-from-scratch types in the City of Heroes community bristled at their efforts being lumped in with teams that started with a codebase leaked through studio devs. This is a serious philosophical division that exists in these scenes, and it’s always been the top source of drama in SWG too, but to most gamers, it remains a distinction without a difference, and they just want to play their dead MMOs in peace and don’t really care whether the code was leaked from a friendly dev or rewritten from scratch. Generally, the only people who care are the people who do the rewriting from scratch, and so here we are with another such drama.
We did reach out to the current SWG Legends staff, a representative for whom (wisely) told us, “We’ve already said what we needed to say, and we are trying to move forward.” So until the thief has any takers, it seems as if the whole thing will peter out. But over on the SWG Legends Discord, players seem to doubt that other servers will accept the stolen material, owing to mutual respect for each other – that, and the belief that they could never trust it, as a Reddit mod who’d hack one server over a niche 14-year-old grudge would surely inject ways to hack other servers in the future. That’s the thing about trust, eh?And for what it’s worth, the Reddit isn’t really impressed by the grudge and theft either.
“I’m just trying to play around with a lightsaber after working 60 hours in a week,” one Redditor wrote. We are all this guy.
