I am excited to see 1.3 since it will be the last chance that Bioware has to keep me as a player till next year. I was really becoming bored and disheartened with SW:TOR prior to the Guild Summit. Many of the things that would keep me with the game were discussed there and I, like many others, came away with the impression that most of that would be in 1.2. Well most of it was not in 1.2. After that the free month for level 50 by a certain time so upset most of the guild that I came to the game with and they have completely stopped playing. In many cases they still have months already paid for that they are not using and they have no plans to give SW:TOR another try. So if 1.3 looks like it has what would keep me with the game I will not let my subscription end. If the items are not there, I will let the subscription end and uninstall the game. I may come back in 2013 to look at what has been added to the game and consider resubscribing then. But right now it looks to me like SW:TOR will be a repeat of STO. I did not return to that game till they went F2P.

I have enjoyed many MMORPGs that I have played that are like SW:TOR in that they are designed to be PvE games with PvP as an option. I will be honest that in many of this style MMORPGs I have had fun PvPing at times. But I am starting to get worried about the direction of SW:TOR. To be blunt the developers seem to be planning on SW:TOR being a PvP game with a PvE option. Is this true? I get this feeling because prior to 1.2 PvP was the quickest way to gear up for PvE content. After 1.2 PvP still seems to be the best mechanism to gear up for PvE, especially for the Imperial Players. I am in favor of the ranked PvP but with the posts that implies that a significant effort is being put into Open World PvP I am worried. My experience has been that significant open world PvP significantly disrupts PvE play. Especially when the players and developers feel that restricting open PvP to PvP only zones like Restuss in SWG and Wintergrasp in WoW is not open world PvP.

So let me see if I have this right. For bugs you run a two tier system for bug reports. Tier 1 is operated by Customer support and Tier 2 is operated by development. This is very common and to be honest is needed, especially on something like an online MMORPG. The problem with the player perception may be that the two are not loosely coupled. When I ran QA at several major companies, The Tier 1 bug reports were closed as one of the following or left open: Duplicate - The bug is a duplicate of a bug that is open in the Tier 2 system. User Error - From further investigation the problem reported is not a bug and was due to the user making a mistake or misunderstanding how things work. An explanation has been presented to the customer. Resolved - The bug has already been identified in the Tier 2 system and the Tier 2 bug has been fixed and had not yet been sent to the live systems when it was reported. Of course if they are the first report they are left open till resolved and other bug reports are duplicated to it. This system does not change how things are done by the development team. It does make the customer feel better about their bug report. Simply closing it when it has been accepted by development gets into the situation that was mentioned here. The person reporting the bug, if it was not immediately fixed, feels that they are being ignored. As you point out this is not true but it is had to show players that through actions if a bug has been given a low priority by the developers. There is also an advantage to using this type of system. If make it easy to show how make customers have experienced the bug. For a development team that wants the customers to be happy, one factor that is used to set the priority of a bug is not only the severity but also how many customers it has impacted negatively. A system like this allows that information to be collected and easily update. I am glad to see that character copy to the test servers has been recognized as a real testing problem. When that is put in place you need to also start fresh on the test servers with each major patch. It will solve some potential problems with character copy on an ongoing test server. But it will answer the question about the test server getting minor patches, it should be the live code plus the changes that are planned. The clean install of the test servers will clear out any code that was tested and did not make it to the live servers.

You may have been a bit harder on them than I would be. But I want to add something to these points. The Rakghoul plague at the very least should have lasted longer. Since to complete it you had to add a piece every 24 hours it almost forced you to be working on it on day one or two and stay at it every day. For those that have a life and can not play every day they were excluded by the combination of the event structure and the short period of time from completing it. So bad design and implementation part 1. Now to what you comment on. Forced PvP flagging to complete a event that has no inherent PvP theme on a PvE server will never be looked on in a positive manner. If the bulk of the players are on PvE servers, doing things like this is a sure fire way to upset them. Plague spreading to those that did not want to participate was also a predictable way to upset players. All one needed to do to predict this was to look at the plague spreading event in WoW prior to the release of the Wrath of the Litch King event. The developers did it because they wanted players to experience the hopelessness that the characters in Warcraft III felt with the original spreading of the plague. They achieved the goal, but also learned that the average player was not interested in it. This was compounded by players abusing the mechanism to deliberately interfere with the game play of others. So players not liking this aspect on both PvE and PvP servers is to be expected and something that should be avoided if a game is bleeding subscriptions. Ganking during the event on PvP servers. Well this is a problem because of why some players play on PvP servers and is to be expected. The only ways to avoid this is to make the event areas sanctuaries with no PvP or to extend the time to give people more opportunity to complete it. This is something that easily should have been foreseen and plans put in place to deal with it. On PvP servers players camping the vendor is also something that should have been expected. This could have been minimized by replacing the one vendor with one in each factions starport. On top of this you forgot to mention that for many people the jump in populations on Tat created severe lag problems for many people. I was not able to complete the two level 50 operations bosses because I lagged out and DC'ed during both of them. From talking with people this was a common problem on my server. I also had an alt that was at the right level for Tat and I could not play him during the event due to the lag on the planet. The way that the Rakghoul Plague event was presented implied that it went smoothly and was a great success and enjoyed by all. This either shows a total disconnect between the developers and what is happening in the game or that they must tote the company line that everything is going great in anything they say about the game. The "Miscommunication" that you mention was probably the most damaging thing that they did recently. If they had granted 30 days of game time to everyone when they got their first level 50 it would have been seed a lot differently. As it was with level 50 by a certain day and eventually Legacy 6 to try to minimized the damage, many players that were enjoying the story for their character and taking their time to level simply interpreted this as Bioware only caring about players that leveled quickly, spent lots of time in game and worked on many alts. Many that I have talked to as they cancelled their subscriptions said that this proved that the proclaiming that SW:TOR was innovative by focusing on Story was not true. Bioware was clearly, to them, rewarding players that did not take time to enjoy the stories and be immersed in them.

I want to comment on the testing statements that were made. I started testing games in Austin in the early 1980's both working for companies and as a consultant. Later I worked for IBM and HP on operating systems and later for companies doing massive real time network operations. I eventually retired as a Software QA executive. So with this background and experience I have some statements to make. To get the type of testing mentioned done the following needs to be done. Major changes need to be done on a clean system. To have the results of past bugs and removed projects persist through retaining past characters only makes the results less and less reliable as time progresses and these build up. Players need to be able to clone their current characters to the test server. This can be abused to bring over clones of items if not restrained. The most effective way to constrain potential abuse is wipe the server at each major patch as noted and limit the number of copies per test cycle. If the testing emphasis is to be on end game content, players need to be able to also use standardized "Premade" characters with equipment of the type the the developers are designing the content for. Since it is easier to get people to place characters on the test realm for major changes the server should not be wiped for minor update testing. So clean server for 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 but not 1.2.2, 1.3.1 and so on. Incentives are not needed to get people to test. Generally the best results come from those that do not need incentives. But if not enough players are using the test servers then some incentives are useful. SW:TOR is not is a state to implement this yet so how close is it on each of these points. The SW:TOR development team is on record that they do not plan on wiping the test server. In the long run this will be a problem but until they have implemented the automated character move/copy between servers they are correct in not using clean servers. However, when EA can offer character copies they need to reverse this policy and start using clean servers for each major patch. SW:TOR currently only has the ability to manually copy or move characters from server to server. This can not be used repeatedly for the test server due to costs and time to do it. Since EA is working on implementing this feature, the ability to do this should be added about that time. It would be at this time that using a clean server at each major update is implemented. While it is easier to code the generation of "premade" characters, there is no reason to do this. The most cost effective way to implement this feature is to "copy" from a static character each time. So after the previous bullet is implemented you also manually created these static characters that have the gear and abilities that the developers are designing the content for. This is a policy so it is easy to implement and is the current state of the test servers. The current incentives are a start, but are probably not enough if clean servers are used to test major patches. Additional limited availability items like those added for the recent plague event could be rewards for testing. As I see it the developers are doing the best that they can but the testing will be inadequate until this summer when character transfer is implemented. At that point it can be improved. I would also like to comment on the "invitational" character copy that was done to test 1.2. It has been my experience that invitational testers have a tendency to play the game and therefore test the game just like the developers and internal testers would. They generally will not do the unexpected testing that the developers stated that they need. But given the nature of 1.2 and the lack of an automated copy it was the best that they could do. In the future though testing plans should not be built around repeating this.

I would like to see Dantooine and Dathomir added to the game. Both of these planets would fit into the current time line for the Star Wars universe. Personally I would like to see Naboo, but the situation on Naboo at this time in the official time line would not be possible. For Dathomir I suggest the one from Clone Wars and not SWG.

Just to clarify. What most player really are asking for here are Custom schematics for much of the early equipment offered in game. (The colors can differ slightly.) In general these are the traditional looks that players are talking about and the meshes already exist in game and have been properly tested. Most of the players making comments like this are not requesting new meshes or anything that clearly requires a lot of lead time. Also most, especially in the RP community feel that these custom crafted items need to be available at relatively low levels, 15 or 20, so that players can get their look early on and stay with it. For Jedi this also means crystals in the Red, Yellow, Blue and Red "Iconic" colors should be readily available. A case for Cyan, Magenta and Purple being added can also be made.

Well clearly there needs to be a way to "break up" just like there is in real life and leave the romance path. I strongly support a way to end this, especially if entered into it accidentally. I must also be added before any same sex romance options are added. Players may be surprised to accidentally enter into such a situation.

I would like to suggest that waiting for 100% is a formula for disaster. Games like SWG followed this policy and quickly earned the distrust of the player base. One of the biggest problems was that if you wait till you are 100% sure that something will be added and the implementation is hated by all players, there is no opportunity to change and you ship something that upsets the player base needlessly. The SWG team did announce a few things that they were considering doing. In two cases the community rejected the proposal for very good reasons. This saved the development team considerable effort on something that would needlessly upset players. In other cases the feedback guided the development team to implement things that were greatly loved by the players and were seen as a great improvement to the game. WoW does have some upset players, but in general when they make dramatic changes to the game they have won over the majority of players because they start talking about things when they only think that there is a 50-60% chance of being in game. Often most of the discussion is why they feel the change is needed to make the game better and players do suggest alternate mechanism to achieve the same goal. But even there the WoW development team has dropped some things because the players proposed better ways to achieve the same goal or the development costs of what they were planning grew to the point that they needed to drop it and cut their losses. But they have gained far more trust from their player community than other MMORPGs. I have long advocated that being open and talking more about less than 100% plans is the only thing that games should copy from WoW. Since this has been shown in the games that do it to increase trust in what the developers say. As you can see in the discussion about this game the developers are quickly loosing credibility with the players.

Certainly measurements of what is happening in game is very important and is probably the best way to measure if player actions in game match expectations. While I do not bother with twitter and only log into facebook twice a year I do agree that they are a way to supplement the statements in the forums about what people think of the game. Good Customer Relations Managers will understand that most of the comments in all three of these areas will be driven by dissatisfied players and their activity often makes that community look greater than they actually are. As to in game feedback. I personally see no reason to go beyond what WoW has on their test servers. There they ask for feedback on every quest completion. That makes sense to me.

Just a few things to say about the UI; both what works and what is missing. First things that are missing. You must always be able to set the scale for each individual item. More bars - (It is something that has been said is in the plans, just reinforcing that it is needed.) Buff/Debuff bars that can be moved and repositioned. We need the ability to name and save API and share them account wide with all our characters. (If the UI API could be exposed and a programming language added so that players can develop a way to do this. ) Add the ability to hide each UI element based on being in combat or not. Add the ability to show only ground or space elements. Right now it is very confusing to configure the space elements. What I like. I use a game keypad to do the button pressing. I can now make the bars look like the keypad to remind me what buttons to press. Most elements can be relocated so that I can make it look like other games that I play. This means that I do not have to relearn the key parts of the screen to watch. I can put those elements in the same screen location and off I go. I have read several suggestions by others and I know many in WoW and other games where players can modify the UI using LUA where much of what they are asking for is possible. I do know some that even use that but more and more I am hearing people that are no longer using many of the things that I have not mentioned. So my advice is to look at where the requests are coming from and what is readily used in other games before prioritizing the work.

Our guild is currently disintegrating because of decisions. As a Roleplay guild players were enjoying leveling up. Then the Level 50/Legacy 6 reward was announced. Many players who were no where close to getting this reward, felt insulted and have stopped playing and canceled their subscriptions. Others have found that game changes made it difficult to impossible for them to solo their class storyline until they have way outleveled it. They do not want to ask for assistance since they do not want to spoil the story for others. Many have left the game since they feel that the developers neglected to adjust storyline quests to be doable with other changes that they have made. These are just a few examples of why our guild members have been leaving recently. Are the developers aware of these unintended consequences and are they planning to address these issues? (As an observation. While not a great fan of the last few years of SWG, the developers for that game, using NDAs did put in place a set of player advocated to provide feedback on changes like this.)

You might want to reverse that; Rift would be one of the few games that doesn't charge for transfers. At least, not general transfers. For those that played Star Wars Galaxies, the final mass loss of subscribers started with the free transfers. What happened there was that everyone transferred to the fad Server of the Moment and they the lag drove many of them from the game. I can very easily see this be repeated if SW:TOR were to add free and regular server transfers like SWG did and Rift does.

I have to admit that I stayed around for 1.2 specifically since multispec was implied to be there. I was willing to wait for 1.3 but it will not be there either. At this point I will be letting my game time lapse and return to the game in the future should they implement more interesting things to do. At this point the guild is bleeding characters which has made hard modes and operations impossible for me to do. I have done all the story lines that interested me. So while there are lots of planned things that interest me; it looks like I will be better off waiting till after the release of MoP to give this a try.

It was mentioned that there will be additional player playable species this year. Will there be a species change option to go with that or will the number of characters per server be increased? We have already seen many players complain about 1.2 in that they have to delete characters to play races that they wanted.