Alexandria,
Well, I took a break too. And, although we've never met in game; Here's my Veteran's point of view of what has changed over the past 4 months:
On the top of the list at # 1:
1) Jump To Lightspeed! Space rocks. Finally an easy way to make money without a group. Simply kill a bunch of 'equivalent to' Meatlumps in space and you can sell items that go directly into your inventory after a kill to a Chasis Dealer convieniently located at your local Starport for whatever level the item is at 1000 credits per level up to lvl 8. The Downer is, given the twitch format and the AI of NPCs... it can come off as too easy or too hard to master Pilot. In fact, this one either promotes solo Aces' to fly alone or it forces you to group massively just to master your profession.
2) Loot. A lot of different disposable (and actually very usuable) loot has been added to the game. New loot kits to make things like new posters for house decoration have been added. Things of that nature.
3) Pretty much everything else is about the same. Armor, Buffs, TEF, all of that works the same way.
4) You can sit and not be pushed off of a chair now. That's nice.
5) Their pretty well getting rid of AFK macroing. You just about have to be online, or will have to very soon, if you expect to get anything out of it. Bye bye afk Barkers pretty soon I hope. Its still in the game; But their working on it. for a change.
6) The staff has gotten bigger and they seem to be genuinely trying to work on fixing the game and listening to the community.
7) If your a swoop fan. You'll be happy to know there are swoop race tracks now. Just a fly the waypoint line to try and beat someone's time to get a badge thing... but fun.
8) Well, here's a touchy subject in closing, Jedi is pretty much attainable by anyone and everyone now. They've made the grind much worse and haven't really fixed the fact that now a large portion of people are grinding out massive ammounts of xp to convert to Force Sensitive xp to get Jedi. So, hologrinding isn't really gone.
The Lunatic Fringer