Announcing The Old Republic Guild Summit

this is odd too say the lest, as a guild leader I don't think I can just drop $300/600 on a plan ticket... just saying

I said no such thing.

It's a numbers and logic issue. What are the odds that a single player will be able to influence others, over someone who leads a multitude of others in a permenantly organized manner?

Guild leadership positions are a natural location to look for such an individual.

Because they're too afraid to pick me.

All very valid reasons.

Explained... by who? Fellow players? Rabid fanboys who will attack any remote hint of criticism? Developers?

I'm less interested in BioWare listening... as I am in BioWare AUSTIN listening... but your point is well taken. It's not that they're not interested... it's that they want the feedback and two-way communication to represent a larger sampling than those that they are ultimately going to meet with.

Were they to limit it to individual players, I see no way it wouldn't become some form of a popularity contest, unless they limit the selection pool to some already smaller group of, say, their early beta testers. Or their favorite beta testers.

I can see this as being undesirable, from the simple standpoint that it could create too much feedback or uproar over... well... the heck with it. Sure, throw it into a dedicated forum so it can all be collected in a single location.

I think the question to ask is this; will those who attend be placed under any form of non-disclosure agreement? There are very real legal ramifications that may not have been considered by most of the community by being granted an actual preview of unreleased content in its development stage. Possible stock price and investment issues could arise from such information. It's remote, but not out of the question. That could be a major reason if they impose age restrictions...

Bolded for emphasis. When your pre-launch beta client and your post-launch retail client are nearly identical, that is NOT a good thing.

They should have been talking to guild leaders and developing features last year.

It's nice that they're going to use our hard earned subscription funds to entertain others, be told pretty much the same thing that they were told FOR OVER A YEAR by many of their beta testers, for yet more non-binding IOU's/promises of features that may or may not come to fruition (but that we're now paying them more money while waiting for those features to perhaps, one day, show up...).

Ahhhh... the magic subject. Subscriber retention. I'll give ... wait... nahhh. Nope, I'm going to give BWA the benefit of this doubt. Is it a coincidence that this PR event is announced within days of when subscriptions were to be converted from included game time to actual paid/founder status? Sure makes ya wonder, doesn't it? Now, maybe it's a coincidence, after all... or perhaps someone finally woke up the investors that the retention rates weren't as expected, and discovered that they actually wanted to know why. Gee, that was an interesting PR song and dance that's been reported as having taken place yesterday with some careful phrasing...

The leaders that are attending have to pay for everything themselves. So basically, a lot of these people will need to spend, atleast, a couple hundred dollers to go down there and tell you what is wrong with your game?

Not all leaders, some leaders get all expenses paid. The ones pre-invited.

Guild leaders existed, but with such a small initial tester base, they really just needed to actually listen to their testers, not just the few ad hoc guild leaders. I gave BWA a list of 15 major items they could have concentrated on, and even clarified them for the typical fanboy critics that repeatedly attacked me for daring to critisize SWTOR (in full violation of forum posting rules, with no action taken against those people whatsoever... a trend that continues).

To be fair, there are some major difference in the clients, though I doubt I can reveal details I noted of them. Suffice to say, some game *content* changed, or was added... and a lot of content-specific bugs were actually fixed. None of that counts as a major change, though, in my book. What I'm talking about are serious design flaws or what I'll term as valid, but ill advised, business decisions that have resulted in avoidable issues that will plague the game for quite some time, perhaps forever. None of those have been addressed, and most of them should have been fixed, added, or changed, months prior to launch, in order for thorough testing to occur.

I don't mean to troll, but I fail to understand this.

If your goal is to inform the community about upcoming changes, tell them what will happen, what you are working on right now, than this is nonsense.

We, the community have several threads here, on these forums, BEGGING for a few answers to simple questions since the game launched, and we hit walls of ignorance.

If you want to tell us whats going on, TELL US! Your failure to communicate is epic. I could point to loads of threads where you decided to give an answer, and the answer did not address the questions of the topic. But in most cases you just choose to be silent.

So, I think it's safe to say that communication is not what this guild summit is about. What is it about then?

Marketing. The Pearl Harbor Movie effect. Why do you think the Pearl Harbor movie premiere was in Hawaii, on a battleship, and was an amazing event? To make journalists forget about how crappy that movie really is. "Buy" the love of the key people, to make them influence the masses. That is whats going on here.

I wish you would just take a few hours and give proper answers to the big questions/issues around the forums.

For Example:

Q: Why were all the cool armor sets removed before launch? Why is there no armor progression?

Bad Answer: There are plenty of sets for each class. (there are only recolors, and this is not an answer to the question)

Good Answer: We removed the sets because we want to add them with expansions. We removed the sets because they caused XY bugs, but we expect them to be back in the game in the next 1-2 months.

If you would not fail to communicate here on the forums, people would not have this bitter taste in their mouths all the time, and issues/bugs would not be such a gigantic problem, because we would have info on whats really going on behind the scenes and what we can expect.

What i want to know is having guild leaders attend is all well and good, but how does that represent the players who are not in guilds?