Announcing The Old Republic Guild Summit

Logical fallacy.

So in your mind, those who want to help this game succeed, should have no problem with asking a very small group of very specific people, to pay to travel to Bioware's home and repeat ad nauseum what is repeatedly posted here on the board, while alienating those not invited.
While those who find this insulting and stupid, clearly want this game to fail.

Are these guild leaders more important, insightful, smarter, than anyone else? Are these select chosen more important than you? Because that's exactly what Bioware is telling you, and you seem to be thanking them for it.

To you that's a great idea. To you, anyone who sees the BS in this event hates the game and doesn't want to help.

Let me ask you something, what do you think is going to be said there that hasn't already been said every day here for several months?

Why can I not want to help this game, without having to accept a publicity stunt?

Then I ask you what are these forums for? What is the Facebook page for? I think it's great that Bioware wants to be more personal with us. That's awesome. But they've avoided the most basic level of interaction. Can't say I blame them, this forum can be very hostile. I'm very hostile. That's something they have to deal with as professionals.

when I make a suggestion I don't expect the developers to come running thanking me for turning their game around, with whatever dollar store, armchair wisdom I decided to crap out that day, as opposed to my usual schedule of equal parts eating, sleeping, and crying, but I certainly don't expect them to call a special summit after so many people did the same as though we hadn't said anything at all.

I don't think that this is the way to do it. If they want to have a nice get together with fans, then do it. o it at a convention, have regular meet and greets once a month but don't alienate the community with invitation only events under the premise that this about feedback.

Especially when the forum is full of amazingly written posts, by very intelligent people who want this game to succeed. If they can't see past the pointless doomsaying and trolling, then I don't know what to say.

I truly can't believe that people are ignorant of the fact what it would cost, $2000+ for me, to fly out to Texas.

Let me take a wild guess, you have either a well paying job, live in America or are just trolling. Which is it?

The reason you pick out the guild leaders is some combination of representative democracy and because you need to quickly iterate the discussion back and forth, and those people are hopefully more expert than the random collection of people on the forums. In the physics business in canada every year they have a "chairs" meeting. All of the department chairs in Physics at universities meet up and discuss stuff. There are a lot of other good ideas from just regular physicists but you need some way to filter down, and if you have a good idea you take it to a guild leader and see if they will pitch it on your behalf.

BioWare guys right now are experts in how the game is made (hopefully), but they have no real clue how it actually plays because they've played this, and every previous iteration and how they approach it and what they see is going to be heavily skewed.

And no, guild leaders by themselves aren't going to do it. People who are experts in HCI, quantitative systems design, software engineering will ultimately have to tell them how to fix it. But as you said, they botched a lot of the feedback we gave them in beta, they didn't even test the right things in beta (weekend betas... really?). So you either try and help them learn to do it properly or you give up and walk away. I don't work for free, so even if I got an invitation I wouldn't go, if BioWare wants my opinion my resume is on file, the VP of EA canada has my e-mail, the director of BioWare montreal has my e-mail, they're free to give me a desk in Edmonton or montreal. But that doesn't mean I don't understand what they're trying to do. They obviously don't have a good way to organize or aggregate all the data they're getting from the forums. That's more of a problem better solved by a computer scientist than a town hall meeting with guild leaders, but I see where they're coming from. It's the MBA approach to solving a technical problem, which in the short term is probably the best they can do.

So instead of summoning forth a crap shoot, based on guild status, why not look directly for the smart posts on these boards?
The ones that already give the information sought.

That way you can go entirely off the ideas, right off the bat, rather than fishing for quality discourse, and merely hoping you get it, from a tiny cross section of a cross section of a cross section.
Assuming guild leaders are going to be a good call, is better than nothing, I agree. But the fact is,
the alternative isn't nothing. The alternative is easier, and cheaper.

It's like they're fishing with a hook, when they already have a net full of fish.

Great youll listen to guild leaders as if they speak for everyone, you have 9 days to win me back, go.....