You have to wonder if the team behind Star Wars: The Old Republic is getting a bit desperate.

First the controversial-to-some promotion of gifting players with level capped characters free subscription time.

Now there’s a live event which, to this outsider, seems suspiciously similar to a well-known bugged event in World of Warcraft. I mean, I know that BioWare seem to be throwing story to the wind and pasting in more end game raid content, but do they really need to copy World of Warcraft’s bugs too? Or maybe they consider this one to be a feature.

In all fairness (and slightly more seriousness), the event seems to be quite the hit with many SWTOR players, so I guess it’s not entirely a bad move to replicate some of the more notorious events from the Disney of theme park MMOs, while placing them in a more controlled environment.

What I want to know is, are they trying to respond to the Mists of Pandaria beta by appealing to World of Warcraft players, or the ‘pre-players’ of Guild Wars 2’s rather successful recent pre-post-pre-order-purchase activation, or both?

Certainly, to my mind, they seem to be desperately scrambling to respond to something, I’m just curious as to what that something is, and why they feel the need to respond so soon in their game’s life.