Announcing The Old Republic Guild Summit

THANK YOU.

It's absolutely astounding to me, that so many here can praise BW, for this insanity.

They're literally spending god only knows how many thousands of dollars, to fly select players on a free vacation, to tell them all the things we've all be telling them for almost a year. Then they expect anyone else to pay out of their own pocket, to do the same.
It's mind blowing how shameless they are, trying to spin this crap into an event.

How gullible and thoughtless, the player base can be, when it comes to swallowing blatant, obvious, PR damage control.

A much better approach would have been to openly invite all guilds to apply and then pick randomly.

Seeing as the mass majority of guilds that I see and inquire to people about seem to be about 7-20 active people I don't really think that the mass majority of the fan base is not going to represented in this.

I also can't see them flying out any European guild leaders to be involved in this. Unless they're paying for a flight from European cities to America, and then the connecting flight to Texas, I can't see any normal person from Europe being able to afford this. A quick look at the prices for me to get there, for example, is about £800 for a return trip. That's 1200$. And that's just for the flight and I live in a major European city with 2 airports that run flights to the US.

Being able to meet the devs and talk face to face is a nice idea, but seriously, they're ONLY letting people do it face to face?

A far more cost-effective and fair system would be to have a series of internet chats for people to submit questions for the devs to answer. Plus they wouldn't be limited to what..8 hours of Q&A? They could do them until the community seemed satisfied that they'd had some pressing questions answered.

To be honest, I feel like we have no way to give accurate feedback to the devs in this game. I know people say that they read the forums etc, but unless they employ people to look at every forum thread and see if it is a pressing issue then I don't think if I raise an issue it's ever going to be seriously looked at.

I hate to wail on BW, but to be perfectly honest their customer service is very lacking. That's not some random accusation, but so far I've had my pre-order code not put in properly, it took until 3 days into the early access period for someone to even reply and get my code put in properly, and even then they didn't give me the correct date that I redeemed the code but instead lumped me in with all the people who redeemed in late december. When asking for them to fix this I had no response for a further 4 days, not, infact, until after the early access period has finished. To add to this, when I tried to ring their European phone line, this is the message I got "If you are inquiring about account security issues we have fixed said security issues, for all other problems please call back later" for 2 DAYS. I've had planet storyline quests fail to update for me and not got a response until 3 days after the event, by which point I've just given up and moved onto the next planet and had to pvp to keep my level appropriate. I've had TOS violations accused against me on more than one occasion, with no feedback to the specifics of my "violation", which were then rescinded after I sent emails to the account disputes email, which is a sign of being trigger happy on the ban front. Also, normally I'm not one to complain about downtimes, but recently they did downtime from 8am - 4pm on a saturday for me, which for central Europe was 10am-6pm. And now they run an event for the community to give feedback, when they're blatently only going to choose the biggest guilds on the USA servers... Just feeling a bit isolated and let down here.

I have a dozen big and small issues that I personally want to raise and get feedback on, but I really don't see the point in putting them on the forum because the threads are just going to be trolled, or lost in the multitude of "This game sux, I'm quitting" threads, and never get a response.

Sorry to be so negative on this thread, but it really is just a gimmick and will do little to help the community relations problems. Infact, I think it will more than likely make more people feel isolated than included in the discussion.

Oh, and I'm saying community relations and customer service, I'm not complaining about their patching or bug fixes at all. I think they've done a good job of getting bug fixes out quickly, even if there are still some issues that really need attention, I think they're doing a lot of work on that front and it really shows.

You know why they pull a select few? Because half the people on these boards are nitwits who don't supply constructive criticism and all they do is complain. It's really difficult to fix and issue when people are so nondescript. Cry more. And i'd like to see you do their job. QQ, cancel sub pl0x.

When the truth comes out about this event, I'm sure the "paid" people were international or non-us. US people can pay to get to Austin but a fair "committee" would have to be made of international members right? The international people are the only ones in my opinion that have a legitimate gripe....but if a few are paid to come I'm okay with that.
I hope BW tells us at least what countries the paid members are coming from.