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A Message from the Community Manager


JovethGonzalez

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As post previously about the boy who cried wolf this seems to be a repost of a promise for greater communication.

 

But what has been worked on for the last 4 months? When will there be a reason to play the game once you make level 50 such as it being fun to do and not just a grind of hard mode or PvP flash points. When will open world PvP come back and perhaps eqaully importantly how will you make it so its option for everyone and not just people with ranked warzone gear?

 

When will we see guild, social, solo, crafting, companion or story progression? Does the move to F2P mean an end to full VO? In short rather than tell us there will be more communication what is happening with the game and ultimately from a purely business need why should I log in once I have completed the story?

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May I politely ask, that what with this new strategy and all, you think about communicating less about the communicating, and more about the game. Let's start with a few things we would like concrete answers to, outside of the whole F2P FAQ I assume (and hope) is being cooked up somewhere:

 

  • New content expectation, HK, v1.4
  • PUG RWZ
  • Choosing specific WZs when queuing
  • Server transfers and legacy merges
  • Fixing identified bugs
  • Ilum
  • Dual spec
  • Longer GTN postings
  • Character customizations (both gear and character model)
  • Companion customizations
  • Minigames

 

We don't need to hear that you're listening to us. We'll know that you are when we hear what you're doing for us.

 

Thanks

 

As a community team, we are here to help get answers from developers when they are available. Sometimes, we simply don't have new information or the answers to certain things. The weekly developer Q&A is currently the best place to ask questions related to the development of the game. As I mentioned before, we're going to push for more interactions as part of our new plan.

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This. this. this. This is where you guys, as OUR community team, need to be hammering the devs for a fix, and standing up for US (the community). Or has everyone with a backbone been let go?

 

How are we suppose to justify spend $15/month to Op in a few months if Ops stay broken due to a bug introduced by a patch that was not properly tested.

 

Last I checked, our backbones were still in place. The Ops that you mentioned is currently being looked at and will be fixed as soon as we can. We have a specific person on our team (Amber) that escalates these issues as soon as they appear to our development team.

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As a community team, we are here to help get answers from developers when they are available. Sometimes, we simply don't have new information or the answers to certain things. The weekly developer Q&A is currently the best place to ask questions related to the development of the game. As I mentioned before, we're going to push for more interactions as part of our new plan.

 

 

The community Q&A the seems to always pick a good percentage of questions the have already been answered on a community Q&A? Or the one that gets a lot of "we're not ready to talk about that" and "soon" responses?

 

Can you provide a date when the F2p restrictions will be clarified?

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Also, could we get an official announcemt about SWTOR backing out of Star Wars celebrations, instead of just removing it from the events page with no comment? Why back out of what can be considered the "ultimate" Star Wars gathering?
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As a community team, we are here to help get answers from developers when they are available. Sometimes, we simply don't have new information or the answers to certain things. The weekly developer Q&A is currently the best place to ask questions related to the development of the game. As I mentioned before, we're going to push for more interactions as part of our new plan.

 

So the developers aren't willing to give you information to relay to your customers and by that logic appear equally unwilling to take any feedback from the community.

 

Doesn't that seem to be a very backward way of ensuring that communication is improved and ultimately the game is going in the right direction. Don't get me wrong if the game wasn't going F2P and EA claiming that it is generally considered a failure ignore away but this may not be a good way to continue. More so the list of concerns are what we need to know, if the greater communication ends up being introductions but you still have no new information on content then it seems to lack any real informaiton.

 

The weekly Q&A thread is constantly considered a massive disappointment with the only real information being taunt mechanics or so vague as to be worthless. If this is the best place to get information its a damning indictment of what information we can hope to see in the future.

Edited by Costello
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Paid server transfer threads are created and posted on a daily basis. They are also ignored by the entire community team on a daily basis.

 

Why?

 

I cannot understand why such a HUGE issue is deliberately overlooked by Bioware?

Edited by Graydon
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Last I checked, our backbones were still in place. The Ops that you mentioned is currently being looked at and will be fixed as soon as we can. We have a specific person on our team (Amber) that escalates these issues as soon as they appear to our development team.

 

Joveth, I think what bother's a lot of us is that they clearly tried to fix something and didn't then test it. If they applied the fix for the droid on Vorgath and then tested their fix, they would have seen "oh damn, the droid doesn't spawn at all now." Instead the patch was released with that bug, which in many of our minds is inexcusable.

 

I imagine that if i ran a business and had a product or products that had issues that needed fixing and I didn't test the product after applying the fix then I wouldn't have a business for too much longer....

Edited by ArissArgile
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As a community team, we are here to help get answers from developers when they are available. Sometimes, we simply don't have new information or the answers to certain things. The weekly developer Q&A is currently the best place to ask questions related to the development of the game. As I mentioned before, we're going to push for more interactions as part of our new plan.

 

alright......

 

what info do you have?

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I'm glad to read this and hope for more information about Bioware's future content plans. May I make a suggestion? How about releasing a screenshot on what Bioware is working on without giving away too much information as a small PART of your new strategy? Some teasers?

 

Anyway, I'm glad to read this and hoping for communication on a regular basis!

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Also, could we get an official announcemt about SWTOR backing out of Star Wars celebrations, instead of just removing it from the events page with no comment? Why back out of what can be considered the "ultimate" Star Wars gathering?

 

Edited to be more specific:

 

To be more specific, we do apologize for any inconvenience but our dev team is hard at work on the game, and we just couldn’t spare the staff. We just completed Comic-Con and are preparing to attend Gamescom in Germany next week. Please stay tuned for updates about future events.

Edited by JovethGonzalez
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Dear Joveth Gonzalez,

 

Is it possible to find out if the PTS server will be reactivated and remain active from here on out? So new patches could be tested. I would goto test server if I could clone my lvl 50 toons to the test server. I would also ask that the denova operation well heck any operation only allow 2 16 man operations or 4 8 man operations per instance.

Last night (aside from the minefield bug in denova which i know you guys know about) There was over 100 people in the first instance of Denova (EC). There were times of 3 to 5 second freezing of everyone in the 16 man group.

 

Also I want to know if a new instance is a vew virtual server or a completely separate computer/server. Is the creation of these instances dynamic or is it started by human beings?

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Given our recent transition, our circumstances changed, which included our plans for events. This was a recent change, and unfortunately, we will not be going to Star Wars: Celebrations this year. Stay tuned for updates about future events.

 

Dont mean to be a jerk but that right there is something that buggs me and if you could please pass this on to who ever does the Q and A

 

ENOUGH OF THE STUPID QUESTIONS!

 

you get 8 pages of real hard hitting questions and you take the will SWTOR be at the star wars convention or some equally soft ball or plain dumb question...:mad:

Edited by LuthirFontaine
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I really really want to believe that BW is going to get in touch more.. but my faith has really been shaken, I mean with F2P I was shocked - due to me believing the original things saying that it was not coming. Bugs from beta are still around, group finder is now effectively F*&^'ed now for reasons unknown to modern science.. & things don't seem to be getting any better.

From my POV atm it really doesn't look like the devs care that much about us. One example of this is the few teaser screenshots we've been given - Hoods with masks, hoods folded, an Assassin in heavy armour.. it just seems as though you're holding the burger on a fishing rod, getting our attention with that, then paddling us while we're not looking.

I know most of that is probably (hopefully) unintentional.. but it's really getting to the point for me where I've about had it.

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Dear Joveth Gonzalez,

 

Is it possible to find out if the PTS server will be reactivated and remain active from here on out? So new patches could be tested. I would goto test server if I could clone my lvl 50 toons to the test server. I would also ask that the denova operation well heck any operation only allow 2 16 man operations or 4 8 man operations per instance.

Last night (aside from the minefield bug in denova which i know you guys know about) There was over 100 people in the first instance of Denova (EC). There were times of 3 to 5 second freezing of everyone in the 16 man group.

 

Also I want to know if a new instance is a vew virtual server or a completely separate computer/server. Is the creation of these instances dynamic or is it started by human beings?

 

Yeah I would love some information on anything you guys' are doing to address the raid-wide lag spikes. Nothing like being on Kephess Hard to have a Lag Spike in the middle of a Baradium Bomber. Are their plans to address this? Has someone on your end reproduced the problem?

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Joveth,

that took quite too long and is way too thin.

You already have been declared dead some time ago.

You will have to climb out of the grave and do some things first before anyone is actually starting to listen again.

 

The rumors about my death have been greatly exaggerated. I'm definitely aware that promises mean nothing without anything to back them up. My team and I will be working hard to make sure that we follow through.

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Also I want to know if a new instance is a vew virtual server or a completely separate computer/server. Is the creation of these instances dynamic or is it started by human beings?

 

Virtual: you can't have a server just for one group of players. But today's servers are very, very strong, they could already handle 100s of players five years ago, so...

 

Dynamic. This is basic 90's IT-technology!

Only if all the available machines are full, then they could add machines manually. But that won't happen now, with only 25% of the players left (I'm being generous with that 25%). Unless they unplugged alot of machines to lower the maintenance cost, but I would be very surprised if they already did that.

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My concern right now is EA has an established reputation for not following through on long-term products to realize their potential once profitability and return on investment come into question. As a corporation, they seem to want to expend the minimum resources to hit their diminishing returns markers, and no more.

 

I worry that the F2P coming out is just a way to try and squeeze the most returns they can from the project before they further re-assign development resources onto the next big release.

 

And what I am seeing from the community and dev team so far is not very re-assuring. The game and dev team need to be dynamic, and I fear there is too much bureaucracy and not enough support on the back end for innovation and real content in SWToR.

 

Frankly as to finding ways for the devs to talk to the players- i would rather the devs log in and occasionally test their code. I don't see any benefit to "speaking directly with the devs" and bypassing community relations.

 

I just feel that EA has a track record of flipping titles and maximizing immediate ROI and I do not have faith in the corporation to back or fund the product beyond their finance department's recommendation- and that includes staying with it long enough to grow it into a mature product.

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Last I checked, our backbones were still in place. The Ops that you mentioned is currently being looked at and will be fixed as soon as we can. We have a specific person on our team (Amber) that escalates these issues as soon as they appear to our development team.

 

Was a rollback ever considered? Is Bioware capable of doing a rollback of a game stopping bug like this? I'll never understand why a rollback wasn't done with valor the day of 1.1, that issue plagued us until recently and cost you more than a few subs. As people have pointed out, not being able to do Denova HM is a pretty big issue...for good PvEers, that's the only semi-challenging thing to do all week.

 

And please expound on your newly stated promise to "ensure that new information about the game is communicated as quickly and effectively as possible"? What can we expect? Daily updates? Weekly? Monthly? Honest question, because I feel that your 'team' should be on the forums daily. Obviously that's not what Bioware expects of you, so what should my expectations be?

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The rumors about my death have been greatly exaggerated. I'm definitely aware that promises mean nothing without anything to back them up. My team and I will be working hard to make sure that we follow through.

 

I am curious where Daniel Erickson is, haven't heard from him in some time. :(

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The rumors about my death have been greatly exaggerated. I'm definitely aware that promises mean nothing without anything to back them up. My team and I will be working hard to make sure that we follow through.

 

:eek::eek:

 

Its me. :D

 

I dont recall anyone saying you were dead. But there is a rumor that Daniel and James are now longer working at Bioware/Austin.

 

Is this true? Is this the real reason that you backed out of the SW celebration?

 

Answer those 2 questions with a yes or no answer only please.

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Please Don't take this wrong etc but other games would have something like what happen to EC fixed wirth in hours of it happing . I know for a fact it has been done, i have played those games and when something like this has happen the servers were taken down may be two hours later with a fix . may be for a 4 hours but it was fixxed right away and tested., two games come to mine WoW and Rift . I know it's WoW, i dont mean anything by it . just saying why does it take a day or two to fix something that should have been fix right away ?. if those other games do it . Just a thought . :) . Edited by moonshoter
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I wanted to take some time to reassure you all that my team, the community team, is still committed to you folks. As part of this commitment, we’re excited to let you know that we have been developing a brand new strategy for our team that focuses on developing new ways to bring you more information about the game and the people involved with SWTOR's development.

 

Uh huh. You do realise that we've heard this before, right? Like, the last time you had a "our team has gone through a shakeup" route? Do you remember this?

 

That's a very good question and the truth is that we're aiming for a future in which we have a closer collaboration between you folks, us (the community team), and the development team. I believe that with the new specialty initiative (the one I mention in the blog post), we'll be getting closer to that. Once the infrastructure is set up, the goal is to be more agile in responding to questions and concerns (from the community team POV). As for the game? Well, we're players too so we all have different opinions on this. I love exploring in our game, so I'd personally love to see new planets down the line.

 

That was back in May. And in that entire time, you've had even less communication with us. So, we're to believe you now? Too little, too late. You had one job: listen to what we were telling you, then tell the developers, and once the developers gave you an answer, you tell us. You didn't do that. And then you wonder why over one million of your customers went away?

 

Sorry, mate. But I don't believe you, or anyone at Bioware/EA, anymore. The fact that many of you still have jobs is nothing short of miraculous. Somewhere in the Bioware structure, a major disconnect happened. And yet, we haven't had any announcements of how this disconnect was fixed, or who paid the price for it. You no longer have the confidence of your customers, and it should not have come to this.

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