"How does our feedback work?"

It doesn't. The only feedback EA and therefore BW understands is the bottom line. When people take their money away they start trying to placate the players. Until then they just don't give a !@^%$. It's a shame, but that pattern has been the norm since launch and is a good part of why the current player base is so small. Well, that and poor game design choices like 4.x and 5.x and the next set of ill conceived, poorly planned nerfs.

This is a fantastic question! Keith, Charles, and I discussed this and we want to make sure we are really thorough in giving you the full picture on how feedback is gathered, where it is gathered from, and how the team uses it. What we are going to do is turn this thread into our discussion topic for the week.

 

Tomorrow, all 3 of us (Keith, Charles, and myself) will make posts highlighting how our job roles interact with player feedback as it relates to the team, decision making, etc. Then we can have a conversation about feedback in general.

 

Great question, now it's a rabbit hole we are going to jump down together! Look for our posts tomorrow.

 

-eric

I think everyone should know each other's roles better, as some of the guys roles have changed over the years to.

Well, when you grasp how hard it is to plan, budget, and develop for MMOs, you learn changes do not tend to happen quickly. However, that doesn't mean they won't happen.

 

Like for instance, there is a ton of unhappiness about the story direction for Iokath and KotFE and KotET right now.

 

Does it mean that the devs aren't listening when they continue to release Iokath stuff later this year?

 

Not at all - its just that those things were already in development, and since the $ and man-hours were already spent developing it, better to release it than go a while without content, because from planning to in-game, it probably would take 6 months to a year to cover that.

 

So what good is the feedback? Well, what may end up happening (and I hope it does) is that they take in that story feedback, and scrap the stuff in the planning stages that planned to continue the KotFE ongoing storyline, and instead post Iokath move everything back to the Sith Empire vs the Republic, which most players want. If they did that, we may not see the fruits of our feedback for a year or more, yet it would still be our feedback that allowed that to happen...

I guess. If you don't count the year before story chapters started. The community had the same comments on end game as they did about RNG. And they complained the w hole first year of story. So that's two whole years yet they still managed to release a second year of story and then Iokath. So that's like 3 years of making the same mistake.

"How does our feedback work?"

 

It doesn't. The only feedback EA and therefore BW understands is the bottom line. When people take their money away they start trying to placate the players. Until then they just don't give a !@^%$. It's a shame, but that pattern has been the norm since launch and is a good part of why the current player base is so small. Well, that and poor game design choices like 4.x and 5.x and the next set of ill conceived, poorly planned nerfs.

That is simply not true, Bioware and the devs of the game do read our suggestions and feedback, trust me on that one. You can see on the forums even how things changed and how many unique threads have posts from the Bioware devs in them. Especially Keith is really interacting with the playerbase on the forums so sticking to saying "Bioware doesn't care about us" is simply holding onto a faultive stereotype that game companies do only what is profitable.

Another example is GC, yes, the original implementation of it was bad but look at how it has improved because the devs listened to what the players wanted. "Remove GC" was also feedback, yes, but they can't listen to that because they already had implemented it. It would be like an author releases a book, it gets published and sold and suddenly someone has as feedback "remove chapter 23 to 27". Yeah that is not going to happen but that doesn't mean that the author isn't listening to you or that he isn't taking the feedback into consideration for future reference.

I for example wrote a comment in the Roadmap thread that I believe KotFE and KotET should be revamped and have 2 unique storylines added to have a choice to go back to the Empire/Republic as the Outlander or defect to the Empire/Republic instead of having the sole option to begin the Alliance. Will that ever happen? No, I know that, but my comment may show Bioware that there is a sentiment with the playerbase to have the ability to return to their original faction or defect to the enemy in future content.

TLDR: Don't be the stereotype player "<insert game company> doesn't reply to my feedback they don't listen to players and don't care about us", but understand that not all feedback can be implemented or worked with, but is taken into consideration.

Just because you talk a lot about a problem and galvanize players behind you doesn't mean the devs should do as you say.

It means the devs should place a higher priority on the issue at hand, and weigh your suggestion to fix it against their own ideas and the ideas of other community members.

"How does our feedback work?"

 

It doesn't. The only feedback EA and therefore BW understands is the bottom line. When people take their money away they start trying to placate the players. Until then they just don't give a !@^%$. It's a shame, but that pattern has been the norm since launch and is a good part of why the current player base is so small. Well, that and poor game design choices like 4.x and 5.x and the next set of ill conceived, poorly planned nerfs.

Sadly, I think you're correct. Ben absolutely acted this way - ignoring his customers. Keith seems to be doing the opposite...so give him time please. I know you dislike the nerfs, but those haven't gone live yet...I hope they don't.

This is a fantastic question! Keith, Charles, and I discussed this and we want to make sure we are really thorough in giving you the full picture on how feedback is gathered, where it is gathered from, and how the team uses it. What we are going to do is turn this thread into our discussion topic for the week.

 

Tomorrow, all 3 of us (Keith, Charles, and myself) will make posts highlighting how our job roles interact with player feedback as it relates to the team, decision making, etc. Then we can have a conversation about feedback in general.

 

Great question, now it's a rabbit hole we are going to jump down together! Look for our posts tomorrow.

 

-eric

Hi Eric,

Thank you for your reply. I look forward to your posts

I have to agree that we need to give it a little time, but they are in fire fighting mode now. If they can patch things up and show the community how things are changing for better (Yes - some nerfs will still happen). Then the mass of unhappy people will put down the tar & feathers.

Meanwhile - NiM loot feedback I'm interested in seeing how they handle that to show they take feedback and use it.

Hey folks,

 

As mentioned above, Keith, Charles, and I will make posts in this thread about how we manage/use player feedback in our roles. This is a pretty extensive topic so these posts may be a bit long! I’ll kick this party off.

 

Let’s start by talking about my role as Community Manager. Understanding and using player feedback is a critical part of my job. I participate in a fair amount of business, design, and leadership meetings and my role is to act as a litmus test for the players. Will players like the changes, not like the changes, where will the challenges be, how do we message it, will it impact all players or only a subset, and more. I help ensure the decision makers (such as Keith and Charles) understand the impact their decisions will have on the playerbase.

 

With that as a backdrop, let me talk about where and how we gather feedback. One of the main reasons we gather feedback from so many sources is to ensure we are covering as many types of players as possible. Players come from all walks of life and playstyles and so it is extremely important we understand and consider everyone in our discussions. An example would be these very forums. Those of you who post here represent a small percentage of the overall player-base, are all subscribers, and lean towards a handful of specific, highly engaged playstyles. If we only looked at the forums, it would cover a narrow band of feedback. This in no way diminishes the immense value we garner from your participation here, so please don’t take that as a slight. Now let’s talk about some of the various places we get feedback!

 

The Official Forums and SWTOR Subreddit

I will put the two of these together since they are treated fairly similar. We all read them every day, multiple times a day. It is extremely common that we will link threads to each other in email or internal chats. We will use these threads as conversation points in meetings and I will include them in various reports that I send up to the team. Bug reports come from both of those sources which is incredibly valuable to us. Lastly, I use both the forums and Reddit to have private conversations with folks about various issues including harassment, exploit reports, etc.

 

Social Media

Most of the feedback we receive here comes from Twitter, and it tends to be a bit more broad in the information we are getting. That is, we don’t commonly receive “this specific thing has an issue,” and instead will receive “I think this new XXX is really good/bad because of YYY.” Twitter is also a great resource for service level feedback, such as when we have server/web issues. Social media is also a great source of sharing user-generated content and things from our Influencers and various content creators!

 

Influencers

As many of you know, we have a collection of content creators who are part of our Influencer Program. We gather feedback from them through multiple means. First, we watch/read/listen to their content. Whether it is a blog, livestream, or podcast we try to catch as much of their great content as we can. Second, I am in fairly constant communication with them through multiple means: email, forums, skype, twitter, etc. Lastly, the Influencer group is under NDA with us and so that provides some other unique opportunities to work with them and gather feedback!

 

Focus Groups

We host focus groups for a range of topics and we do it at all stages of development. As early as when things are in the “idea phase” all the way up to playable. Focus groups allow us to get feedback in a controlled manner and more importantly, allow us to ensure we are getting feedback from a very diverse set of players. From the most hardcore to the most casual, we are able to capture all playstyles.

 

There are many more places where feedback comes from such as PTS, data analytics, etc. I hope the above examples outline that we gather feedback from multiple places to get a full picture of player opinion. Again, I wanted to really focus in on my role and how feedback is used, which is to help inform me on player opinion and reactions. I will let Keith and Charles talk more about what impact it has on development.

 

-eric

Seems these influencers hold a good degree of sway. Not saying that as a bad thing, but it could provide some very limited feedback given how much it is weighted - my point being, those hardcore enough to put up a stream, a blog, etc likely skew mostly towards endgame if I had to guess, be that PvP or Operations. Only reason I say that is because from a personality profile standpoint, the people who are playing just to enjoy the story are less likely to be someone who is dedicated enough to start up something like that.

That doesn't mean those influencers hate story - nothing is black and white - but it is more likely they don't hold story in the same regard as others, as leveling for them is about spacebarring content to get to endgame as quick as possible to engage in how they choose to enjoy the game.

The forums used to be a bastion for the pro-story people, although with the reduced numbers, I do wonder if many have moved on - I remember people leaving in waves after the initial announcement of no more class story, and then another wave after KotFE ended up going off in a very strange and different direction than what came before to the point where some said it didn't fee like Star Wars.

I guess what I am wondering is, while I do think all this feedback is important, where is BioWare getting their story feedback from? Because I feel like if they were getting quality feedback on story, the KotFE/KotET debacle could have been avoided in the first place, and even with it there now, there are story options to get the game back on track to what the people who left originally fell in love with, so long as the team is willing to listen to that feedback and willing to change some things, both going forward, and also some restructuring of what's already been released (so as to re-use assets)...

Thanks Eric, i actually cant wait to hear about the others. Your job i knew about most of the things, but maybe a few. I still don't know how someone can handle being a Community Manager. It can be very unforgiving.

I wonder if Eric was handcuffed before. Because he has been on point since the Producer change, moreso than I have EVER seen him.

Being a community manager means being active in the community. Soliciting feedback, and some of the better ones will shoot the breeze with the forum people, essentially trying to foster an environment of positivity so feedback can be more productive and there's less of "I know more about the game than you do, you suck, RAWR!!!" type posts.

Eric is doing a bang up job right now. Granted its only a few months in since the change at the top, but it's been the strongest few months I've seen from him since he started. Kudos to him.

While I am absolutely delighted with this new openness, and genuinely hope the greater understanding between players and Bioware it should lead to revitalizes the the game, I am dubious as to how that can happen unless we address the huge Ice Tromper in the room.

If this:

Let’s start by talking about my role as Community Manager. Understanding and using player feedback is a critical part of my job. I participate in a fair amount of business, design, and leadership meetings and my role is to act as a litmus test for the players. Will players like the changes, not like the changes, where will the challenges be, how do we message it, will it impact all players or only a subset, and more. I help ensure the decision makers (such as Keith and Charles) understand the impact their decisions will have on the playerbase.

 

-eric

is even remotely close to being on the same ballpark as "accurate" how the hell did we end up with 5.0?

I dare anyone from Bioware to link to any feedback at all that supported the idea that 5.0 would be well received by even a significant minority of the playerbase.

Eric, Keith, Charles - I genuinely believe you (and the whole Bioware team) want things to improve, and I believe that this new openness is just one of the processes that should lead to that.

But until you can explain to us how the nice job description above being put into practice ended up with us getting 5.0 then you will fail. Trying something semi-new ONLY ever works when you fully understand why what went before didn't work.

And this new openness and willingness to communicate has not demonstrated that you do; because so far I have not seen one single post from with Bioware that starts with:

We are sorry for 5.0, here is what we did wrong, and this is how it led us to make ALL the wrong decisions.

Until we get that I believe that this "new era" is only being followed half-heartedly, and is to some extent just smoke and mirrors.

All The Best

While I am absolutely delighted with this new openness, and genuinely hope the greater understanding between players and Bioware it should lead to revitalizes the the game, I am dubious as to how that can happen unless we address the huge Ice Tromper in the room.

 

If this:

 

 

 

is even remotely close to being on the same ballpark as "accurate" how the hell did we end up with 5.0?

 

I dare anyone from Bioware to link to any feedback at all that supported the idea that 5.0 would be well received by even a significant minority of the playerbase.

 

Eric, Keith, Charles - I genuinely believe you (and the whole Bioware team) want things to improve, and I believe that this new openness is just one of the processes that should lead to that.

 

But until you can explain to us how the nice job description above being put into practice ended up with us getting 5.0 then you will fail. Trying something semi-new ONLY ever works when you fully understand why what went before didn't work.

 

And this new openness and willingness to communicate has not demonstrated that you do; because so far I have not seen one single post from with Bioware that starts with:

 

 

Until we get that I believe that this "new era" is only being followed half-heartedly, and is to some extent just smoke and mirrors.

 

All The Best

Don't know if you've noticed, but certain things have changed since 5.0.

I find DarthSpuds and fifteendollers posts very interesting as it totally shows the split between the player base.

I guess some of the answer to DarthSpuds question lies in James Ohlen interview some time ago. He mentioned they thought 5.0 would be appreciated by most and launched it as is, contrary to the testers feedback. They admitted they were wrong but only realized it too late.

My take is they did not really had the time to do that much tweaking so they messed up. In a way it's the same issue they had with the NGE, they though the more casual players would love it and were willing to sacrifice the smaller population : the hardcore ones.

Most annoying is how long it took to try to fix it. Even now we are still with a system more complex and more painful than before.

I've been working in the video game industry and it certainly reminds me a situation in which the lead designer was wrong and in the end we had to go with his decision no matter the amount of effort spent to explain to him the issue. Even the producer throw the towel on that one.

Guess what... once live the issue was indeed real and we had to patch it.

Back to SWTOR... regarding the feedback players explained on the forums the 25% bonus for the CXP ain't gonna be enough, still it went live. Guess the focus groups, the social media, the influencers liked it.

My take is they did not like it but BioWare needs to keep players grinding, at least they think so.

Don't know if you've noticed, but certain things have changed since 5.0.

There should not have been a 5.0 in the way it was things changes they did damage control but damage control will not bring back the players that left.

They warned the staff time and time and time and time again that its not an good idea. They went with it and they payed the price.

If they admit they where wrong things can go a long way to show players that they are listened and right.

Don't know if you've noticed, but certain things have changed since 5.0.

That's not the point he was making.

It was previously established that Galactic Command at it's earliest level is a completely ridiculous idea. The support for that feature ranged closer to zero than to evening out with the negative or passive feedback. Most people were either completely neutral on it (i.g "Let's see), like myself, or they absolutely detested it. The community was universally critic about the sole source of set gear being random loot crates. That went on for two months before the feature even released.

I can't imagine that any streamer, blogger, or YouTuber seriously took a look at these changes and said: "This is a splendid idea!" Nobody on the highest tier of raiding and PvPing, which streamers usually are, likes the idea of not receiving set loot for a flashpoint or ranked commendations. I know. I was a competitive raider for most of my BC and WotLK years in WoW. The idea of not receiving loot for dungeons would have killed my guild within a week.

That's his entire point, and from a purely objective viewpoint, I can agree. If Eric participated in countless meetings with the (back then) Lead Designer and aggregated the feedback from the forums into reports, how can that feature have been launched the way it has? How could it have taken them seven months after expansion release to offer the 230 gear on a vendor? How could they have needed a flowchart to explain the new gearing system after four to five months of the expansion being out?

It's not a mean or negative question, but it's a valid question. What they are saying about focus groups and listening to bloggers such as swtorista makes perfect sense. I can completely get behind Eric there. But if he handed in these player reports about how Galactic Command's gearing system was ripped to shreds just as it was announced by a lot of people on YouTube, reddit, this forum, bloggers, and even people like the aforementioned swtorista, then I don't understand how anyone could have pushed through while sticking to that development mentality up there.

I don't blame Eric, but something must have gone horribly wrong during the early 4.X and 5.0 development cycle.

Great question! The most important thing you can ever put in feedback is why. Saying that you do or don't like something is helpful, telling us why is invaluable. This way when I am passing feedback on to the team I can highlight not only just sentiment (positive or negative) but also give supporting context for that feeling.

 

-eric

Why - How - What... you guys are too much into Apple mindset (kidding)

Seems these influencers hold a good degree of sway. Not saying that as a bad thing, but it could provide some very limited feedback given how much it is weighted - my point being, those hardcore enough to put up a stream, a blog, etc likely skew mostly towards endgame if I had to guess, be that PvP or Operations. Only reason I say that is because from a personality profile standpoint, the people who are playing just to enjoy the story are less likely to be someone who is dedicated enough to start up something like that.

 

That doesn't mean those influencers hate story - nothing is black and white - but it is more likely they don't hold story in the same regard as others, as leveling for them is about spacebarring content to get to endgame as quick as possible to engage in how they choose to enjoy the game.

 

The forums used to be a bastion for the pro-story people, although with the reduced numbers, I do wonder if many have moved on - I remember people leaving in waves after the initial announcement of no more class story, and then another wave after KotFE ended up going off in a very strange and different direction than what came before to the point where some said it didn't fee like Star Wars.

 

I guess what I am wondering is, while I do think all this feedback is important, where is BioWare getting their story feedback from? Because I feel like if they were getting quality feedback on story, the KotFE/KotET debacle could have been avoided in the first place, and even with it there now, there are story options to get the game back on track to what the people who left originally fell in love with, so long as the team is willing to listen to that feedback and willing to change some things, both going forward, and also some restructuring of what's already been released (so as to re-use assets)...

Hello there! I am one of the SWTOR Influencers and I feel like I should repsond to your post.

While yes endgame is something I like to do, it's not necessarily what I will upload / stream.

I do in fact love the story in this game and have expressed this before. I think (While not too common) that KoTET and KoTFE were fantastic and a real flashback to KOTOR. Yes, KOTOR is king

Anyways, what I would like to say is that we Influencers do realise that our input can have some "sway" which is why (And I don't speak for all of us) that I try to keep the ENTIRE community in mind when giving feedback. In fact, more often than not I will direct Eric to feedback from viewers of my channel rather than myself. I could give you an excellent example of feedback I gave with the community in mind to the devs but as Eric pointed out earlier, we are NDA and can't talk about such things. So, please be assured that I will do my best when it comes to the future of this game in any way I can, for all aspects.

I hope this helps you

Great question! The most important thing you can ever put in feedback is why. Saying that you do or don't like something is helpful, telling us why is invaluable. This way when I am passing feedback on to the team I can highlight not only just sentiment (positive or negative) but also give supporting context for that feeling.

 

-eric

Yes! That is what has been lacking in almost every post. Constructive feedback involves stating what one does or doesn't like, why that is so, and suggestions to make it better.

When one doesn't say why they dislike something, the scenario is like this:

Waiter: How's your food?

Customer: I don't like it.

Waiter: You don't? Why not?

Customer: I don't like it.

Waiter: But why?

Customer: I don't like it.

Waiter:

Customer:

Hmm.... That didn't go anywhere. Let's see what happens when you say *why*.

Waiter: How's your food?

Customer: I don't like it.

Waiter: You don't? Why not?

Customer: It's a bit over done, and has too much salt to it. However I do love the amount of sauce used. That is set perfectly, and the side dishes are wonderful.

Waiter: I can take what you didn't like back and have it redone. Would you like that?

Customer: Yes. That would be great. Thanks!

Waiter and Customer:

Why - How - What... you guys are too much into Apple mindset (kidding)

 

Ha ha. If they had the Apple mindset, they would be charging us $50 for all customization options, and $200 for each expansion. Our subscription would be $500.