Achernar

I can't be the only person who hates April Fool's Day.

"I never would have tried any of that and never would have become a fan of BioWare were it not for KOTOR. And both Star Wars: The Old Republic and its antecedent had to overcome a very big impediment: my profound antipathy toward the Star Wars franchise."

This is something that isn't said nearly enough. I wouldn't say I quite "dislike" Star Wars, but it's certainly not a franchise I go out of my way to consume. Until TOR, I didn't care about the expanded universe, I didn't care about all the little planets, I didn't care about the how and why of the Force, the Jedi and the Sith. It was apathy in its purest forms, "Oh there's nothing on to watch and I have the Star Wars films on my hard drive and they're the only thing I haven't watched recently? Well, I guess I can watch them while I do something else, fine, whatever."

At least partially because I'm a roleplayer, TOR makes me WANT to scour Wookieepedia for all these little arse-end details that make things interesting and compelling. It makes me want to replay KOTOR and KOTOR II to revisit things I'd forgotten (and oh how much of that there was). I wouldn't say TOR has made me passionate about Star Wars, not by a long shot, but it has made me actually care about the extended universe and its details, it has made me pay attention and say, "You know, there's some bits of this that aren't all bad."

That being said, at no point in my life will I ever own a "replica" lightsaber. That is just not going to happen. The odds of Sith Pureblood cosplay have gone way up, though.

The idea itself doesn't sound all that feasible (in a way that would be fun) and I'm not entirely sure how marketable it would be, but if nothing else, this is the exact kind of thing that could breathe a lot of originality into the industry instead of the current trend of piecemeal innovation.

Someone with a giant sack of money and a desire to see something worthwhile happen with it is a very good thing.