Announcing The Old Republic Guild Summit

Which would all be well and good if this website wasn't already filled with constructive, well thought out feedback.

I can also make assumptions, and say that anyone who is willing to take vacation days, shell out travel/lodging fees, just to do what they do on the forums, is also the kind of person who will simply gush, and tell them that everything is ok.

Or, that they'll be too nervous to tell Bioware what they really feel, when face to face.

If I have the bulk of my vocal community telling me what is wrong, and after months of that, I turn around and say, ok let's see what a tiny fraction of you think, in person. What is any sane person supposed to think?

It's like they want a focus group, when they have the biggest resource imaginable right here. I've yet to see one Bioware sanctioned poll. If they really wanted constructive well thought out responses they'd have them by now.

Cheery picking people from the community based on little more than their guild rank isn't reaching out to the community. If they had any interest in that, they'd be on these boards.

"ZOMG! Publicity stunt!" - Who cares? Pretty cool event either way.

"ZOMG! Stop ignoring all the thoughtful, comprehensive feedback on the forums!" - a) 99% of the posters here are rage-fueled idiots. b) 99% of people who play an MMO don't use their game's forums. c) MMOs are kinda complex, and forums don't lend themselves well to the "discussion" of complex subjects. (They do work well for spewing one-sided, vitriolic, moronic screeds, though.)

"ZOMG! Why not me? I'm so special!" - No, you're not. Mr. Rogers lied. You're not born special. Specialness is not thrust upon you. You have to become special through your deeds.

Anyway, someone shoot me the schedule. I plan on attending just to hang out after hours. Maybe we can turn this into a full-blown event, a la Fanfaire.

The problem is figuring out priorities. The forums give you one mechanism to determine what needs to be 'changed' (broadly, fixed, added, redesigned etc.). But a million people who all agree something is broken is not the same as 100 people who figured out that some other problem is going to screw the game completely for the million.

I'm not sure guild leaders is necessarily the right approach. You run into a lot of legal quagmire problems, raid leaders especially are experts on how to play your game, that's valuable skill (advertising money) and BioWare is asking for you to pay them for the privilege of using your expertise. But you still need to know how to priortise what's wrong.

Take the inability to drop quests. It affects everyone, it blocks progress for a large number of people for a long time because they have to waste time clearing out the log. But it's a bugger of a problem to fix, because in the long chain of sub parts to each meta you'd need to be able to pick the meta back up in the right state. Just upping the quest limit will have serious memory implications (notably in the fleet). So thats the 'technical' side, and probably a reasonable reflection of BioWares internal problems with the bug and what to do about it. But you ask guild leaders and they say 'this a problem that resolves itself at 50, blocks progress at 50, or simply must be lower/higher priority than that ability delay nonsense or a lack of a combat log' and then you have some sense of whether or not it's just really annoying, or if there's something else going on.

The feedback on the forums is a bit like the tyranny of the masses. it sounds all well and good to lop the heads off the 1% and take their money. But this is a game, so it's a giant treadmill, and the people who were 50 on dec 20th were leading the charge for everyone else in the last month and a bit. But of course the people at BioWare have jobs, and don't have time to know all of the intricate problems of both leveling and being at max level yet. That's something that will come with time, but in the interim: They have 400 people for development. How many do you assign to the UI? Raid bugs? The quest thing? Character models (I'm sick of looking like I either joined the *** or gutted a buffalo, and stuck the carcass of its head on my head as a helmet, how serious is that?)? Environment art? Even communication. Stephen Ried is sort of a transfer point for information, and a lot of that information has been woefully inadequate, wrong, misleading, misguided, the wrong level etc. That isn't necessarily his fault, and it's not really serious most of the time, but you need to figure out what should be said better.

Oh and did I mention they left Ilum being PVP exploited for what, 20 odd hours? They need a stiff dressing down for that stupidity, because that, along with the current kill trading, is going to seriously mess up pvp in the long run, and they've let it go on so long it might be very hard to salvage at this point without completely gutting core systems, which, admittedly, need to be gutted anyway, but not nearly this quickly. And then there's the lowbies looting chests exploits on ilum which is going to serious damage the economy. And yet I still count one person on ilum, empire side, doing it right now on my server.


This one of those things were the experts at playing your game will know better what's actually going on, and be able to anticipate problems before you cause them better than you can.

If I would add my 2 proverbial cents to the general feedback though. Operatives and powertechs should have purely ranged specs (not necessarily 30m range, but 10m range). Oh and multi speccing should have been in at launch. The longer they don't have it, the more people are going to be having less and less fun as we converge onto a 1 tank 5 dps, 2 heals, or 2 tanks 10 dps 4 heals setup. (Maybe even 1 tank 11dps 4 heals).

Jen'jidai's revered leader will be there. "Server first" guilds gotta represent!

"ZOMG! Publicity stunt!" - Who cares? Pretty cool event either way.

"ZOMG! Stop ignoring all the thoughtful, comprehensive feedback on the forums!" - a) 99% of the posters here are rage-fueled idiots. b) 99% of people who play an MMO don't use their game's forums. c) MMOs are kinda complex, and forums don't lend themselves well to the "discussion" of complex subjects. (They do work well for spewing one-sided, vitriolic, moronic screeds, though.)

"ZOMG! Why not me? I'm so special!" - No, you're not. Mr. Rogers lied. You're not born special. Specialness is not thrust upon you. You have to become special through your deeds.

Anyway, someone shoot me the schedule. I plan on attending just to hang out after hours. Maybe we can turn this into a full-blown event, a la Fanfaire.

I'll be there with my hard hitting questions such as:

• Jawas; why can't we marry them?
• The door to the shuttle when leaving BT and how it stays there
• The shuttle on Correlia and how it flies through a building
• Is she more than a pretty sidekick, buster?