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Gathering Feedback


EricMusco

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Hey folks,

 

I wanted to kick off a thread and add some clarity on influencers plus seek out some feedback on… feedback (the influencer topic came up here). First, the clarity. I think there became a misconception that we are in constant communication about game updates or future content with the influencers that the rest of the players aren’t receiving, this isn’t true. Since they are under NDA there are situations that they may hear info earlier or be a sounding board for ideas, but it is extremely infrequent. A lot of our communications happening with them in their forum is logistical (sharing their content, etc). Second, is the feeling that we weigh their feedback more than other players, which is also not true. The influencers are a great source of a snapshot of their community, so they can give us a feedback from a number of players at once. However, this in no way means that we weigh the feedback that comes from them differently then the feedback we receive here on the forums, on reddit, from PTS, social media, or any other sources.

 

I definitely hear the genuine concern though that we, BioWare, are not gathering your feedback as much as you want us to be. This is something that over the past year or so we have really made a lot of strides to improve and so the question I want to pose is how we can improve further! Let me talk about the various sources that we collect and respond to feedback, and based on that, let’s talk about how we can get better.

  • PTS – This is one of the places we have put some of the largest efforts. This started in earnest with 5.9.2. Once an update goes on PTS the team has been fairly ravenous in grabbing any and all feedback we can get. This goes from bugs to general change requests. We can’t always account for all feedback and sometimes it may be at odds with design goals, but the team works to change as much as we can before we launch it. We have similarly moved away from announcing specific launch dates so that we can work with you during PTS to get the update to a good place before going live.
  • Forum posts – In some cases we either won’t have enough time on PTS to get meaningful feedback or it isn’t something that will go on PTS at all. In these instances we have been trying to make detailed forum posts to highlight exactly what you can expect, so we can gather feedback even without your ability to get hands on (think of the Guild Perks posts).
  • General feedback – This is a constant stream of feedback coming from you, the players, to us. This comes from a large number of sources but primarily here on the forums, Reddit, and social media.
  • Planned feedback sessions – These can happen in a few different forms. We used to more prominently use PTS in a closed environment under NDA, although we have moved away from it. We also will host focus testing sessions. Most commonly these are in Austin but we have hosted them all over the world. They are hand-recruited sessions under NDA, typically very early in the process.
  • Data – This isn’t feedback, but, data is very important in our feedback cycle as we will compare the information we are receiving from any sources to what we are seeing in the behavior of players.

 

With all of that out there… how can we improve? I know our feedback loop is by no means perfect, but being able to gather your feedback consistently for each update on PTS has helped us quite a bit in getting direct feedback from you. Share your thoughts!

 

Thanks all.

 

-eric

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Hey Eric, thanks for shedding some light on the current situation. The lack of communication between the BioWare staff and SWTOR community has been causing a lot of doubt and resentment in the community. Something I had personally been eagerly awaiting was the upcoming Roadmap. I feel it was the best way to convey the future goals, plans and ideas that BioWare has with SWTOR. It allows players to hold onto something tangible and gives us a sense of assurance, not that everything on the Roadmap is certain but that the game we love has a future. I myself as a growing content creator and owner of myexpanse.net have been rather worried about the future of the game, is all the effort I'm putting in going to matter if the game receives no more updates and dies off?

 

This is why I greatly held out for the Roadmap, until it was announced that we wouldn't be getting one and the information would come through in drabs on the PTS an Dev Tracker. A hugely bad decision in my opinion as it neglects a rather large part of the community, such as free to play players, those who don't visit the forums or have the ability to download the PTS. Aside from resurrecting the Roadmap I believe another great way of engaging with the community is to begin a "Weekly Recap", where you go through highlights of the week, ideas and changes to SWTOR, discussions of the future etc. Perhaps each week you could setup a different topic and allow players to debate on it, to share their different views on a wide range of areas, from PvP to Operations, Story, Classes etc. Once the weekend has ended, perhaps a final response from yourself or another at BioWare SWTOR in order to assure players that their voices are being heard.

 

Furthermore, I believe the Influencer Program is a great idea and I myself have been trying to get into it. However, I believe more transparency should occur between Influencers and the community. Such as, after a certain period of time, content on the private forums is released to the public forums, allowing players to look through and read.

 

Thanks for all your time and dedication Eric, all the staff, content creators and supporters of SWTOR. I've really loved the art direction this game has taken and hope to hold onto this experience for a long time

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Hi

 

Put simply communication is a 2 way thing.

 

On numerous occassions feedback has been supplied yet totally ignored to the derision of the community providing that feedback.

 

Numerous posts on these forums alone go unanswered that quite frankly deserve a response/answer. Yes theres lots of chaff to get through, but there are still lots of important messages to convey.

 

If you want feedback, then engage with the community.

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My biggest concern is lack of feedback on seismic shifts in game direction / mechanics. By way of example...

 

It was reported repeatedly on the PTS that mods / enhancements were slot bound to same gear types. Many of us, myself included, assumed (incorrectly) it was a bug. It wasn't until after the release that we got a one sentence statement indicating this was an intended change and that gearing as a whole would undergo big changes in the future. Couldn't this have been announced before?

 

Without revealing content spoilers, which I completely understand, it was a bit jarring to have this change thrust upon us devoid of a larger context.

 

Another example is Galactic Command. For all intents and purposes, GC is utterly useless now. As you may or may not know, I've been a pretty staunch defender of GC post November 2017 with Patch 5.6. This week is double XP / CXP week. I think it's great for those leveling, but I still did the exact same thing I've done for the past couple weeks since all my characters are at 70. I ran a few of them through Ossus and then stopped playing. Didn't do one other CXP-related activity.

 

Again, I understand you're not going to reveal content specific related information, but it seems you are already implementing these "big changes" in gearing, both with respect to slotting but also GC as a whole. I think it would have been wise to provide an overview of those changes and why.

 

Will some of those changes be unpopular? Of course -- but thrusting major changes on the player base absent a broader framework erodes confidence. The argument some make that it is irrelevant to know earlier may work for some, it doesn't work for me or my ability to persuade my guildmates to sign back up.

 

Dasty

Edited by Jdast
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How can you improve? Ok, first you had a practical hiatus from any kind of forum posting... until you were accused of something and are now here acting all offended.

 

As a more specific example, the locked in slot change to gearing with 252/258 stuff. There are multiple threads screaming about it, your only response amounted to (1) its not a bug and (2) its not changing any time soon. Why did this change, and why refuse to talk about it?

 

As a less recent example, the gearing situation with 5.0. People (myself included) complained about total randomness before it ever went live. You ignored our complaints and pushed ahead anyway, released it resulting in a seeming mass exodus, and spent literal months refusing to acknowledge the problems (oh but you could certainly nerf any way people found to farm cxp). Yes, you finally got around to making a functioning system. It took too long, and you have now undermined that by adding another grindfest.

 

Which, as my lengthy post elsewhere states, made me personally very unhappy. I was going to suck it up and do it. Then thanks to the bugged world bosses I never got my lightsaber. Your refusal to do anything about it other than tell me it was a bug (which I already knew) ended my desire to continue to keep my guild on life support.

 

Back to the gear grind issue - if you're so good about feedback, what is the response to the criticism? You have made no one happy. Ops players aren't happy you can get it with non-MM content, pvpers aren't happy because there's no clear path to get it strictly via pvp, basically you pissed off everyone for no reason.

 

As another example, the conquest changes from a long time ago. These were made out to be rather minor things, resulted in a massive overhaul, and was ignored for a rather long while. You have been finally scknowledging it and attempting to fix it, but its not back to as nice as it was before you bothered in the first place.

 

And what gets me most about you guys is that you state some hokey reason for all these things that is ambiguous at best, create a massive stink, stubbornly refuse to acknowledge it for months, then attempt to band aid fix things that wouldn't have been broken had you never messed with them in the first place.

 

The recent gearing changes as an example:

+Stated reason: Mr Kanneg wants MM gods, but we can't make MM gods completable with 248s!

 

+As implemented: ninja-added a lock in slot to enhancements and mods, in addition to adding 2 tiers rather than 1.

 

+Problems created: non-gods MMs are effectively nerfed

because gear improvements with no recale, PvP community in flames from having to grind new gear, pissed off players who don't want to grind new gear

 

+Thoughts on your true intention: to force people to ossus so your "data" shows people playing it, implying they enjoy it, and your new system is a success, and those of us complaining are minority whiners.

 

And that brings me to my final point. I do not believe your stated intentions match your true intentions, or surely they would seem better thought out or incorporate player suggestions. I too, could manipulate data to make it support what I wanted. That would also be rather futless, as it would not benefit me to see what I want to see. The truth hurts sometimes, and you have to admit when you are wrong. And Musco, you guys suck at admitting you do anything wrong.

 

Finally, I leave with this. I have long felt my loyalty to this game was entirely unsubstantiated and unrequited. I have frequented these forums for literal years, providing advice to new guardians, getting into frequent flame wars in the pvp section, and gradually descending into a level of massive sarcastic jerk. The lack of communication underlies this sentiment. Why should I keep providing you constructive feedback, rather than at least get some semblance of pleasure or humor from being a sarcastic jerk, if you refuse to acknowledge it? Why should I continue to support this game when my loyalty means nothing beyond money to you?

 

Why should we continue to provide feedback just to get ignored, told thats the way it is and its not changing, or continue to receive ninja changes and misdirection?

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I definitely hear the genuine concern though that we, BioWare, are not gathering your feedback as much as you want us to be.

I think the problem sometimes isn't that you aren't gathering it, but that you aren't showing any signs of doing so. Those potential signs *obviously* include making changes that reflect the feedback, subject to the real difficulty of reflecting *contradictory* feedback, where one group says "needs more" and another group says "needs less", especially when a third group says, "needs hammers".

 

However, sometimes, especially when there's a conflict with the design goals ("needs hammers"), it is important to do *something* to explain why the feedback wasn't taken into account. That is, BioWare's communications, whichever team member publishes them, *must* give this sort of information for widely expressed, but not used, feedback, otherwise you risk seeing that we, the players, treat you as if you are (deliberately) ignoring you.

 

Note: I'm not saying that you are, collectively, ignoring us, but merely that you need to take steps to counter that perception.

We can’t always account for all feedback and sometimes it may be at odds with design goals, but the team works to change as much as we can before we launch it. We have similarly moved away from announcing specific launch dates so that we can work with you during PTS to get the update to a good place before going live.

Again, it's fine to see feedback and decide that it is not something you want to change, but there must be an explanation of why not. *Why*, for example, did you keep the current structure of how to acquire 252+ gear when people widely said that it was (in their opinion) the wrong way to do it? (Again, this is not an accusation, but a request for a response to our feedback.)

With all of that out there… how can we improve? I know our feedback loop is by no means perfect, but being able to gather your feedback consistently for each update on PTS has helped us quite a bit in getting direct feedback from you. Share your thoughts!

As noted above, the most important thing is to show us that you have heard what we say, and that you are or are not going to change things based on it, and if not, at least some idea of why not.

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Honesty, not sure if I really believe you anymore and that is sad for me to say for as long as I have been here. It's gotten to the point that my guild is enjoying playing wow more than here and that is sad as we are Star Wars fans and prefer Star Wars but we don't hardly log on here anymore .

 

We always been a fan of making sure everyone is heard and every play style is counted for but lately that is not true anymore so I don't think there is much for my guild to say except prove it. You can talk about being more open but that has been said so many times in the past that now you have to prove it.

 

Remember the tale about the Little boy that cried Wolf, well that is where you are. You have to prove it this time.

 

http://fairytalesoftheworld.com/quick-reads/the-boy-who-cried-wolf/

Edited by casirabit
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You want some feedback? Well here it is...

 

1) No one wanted this new Korean grindfest. No one. All of my toons are still in full 248s and I intend for them to stay that way. I will not PvE just to have better gear in PvP. I only did Ossus to get the datacrons and that's it.

 

2) Ban the cheaters and wintraders in ranked - permanently. If the account is found in violation once, maybe twice, then fine, go ahead and just suspend and reset ratings. But IPs and accounts that have been found seriously doing this multiple times should stop receiving chances. There's a reason why life without parole exists - these cheaters/wintraders CANNOT be rehabilitated.

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Hey folks,

 

I wanted to kick off a thread and add some clarity on influencers plus seek out some feedback on… feedback (the influencer topic came up here). First, the clarity. I think there became a misconception that we are in constant communication about game updates or future content with the influencers that the rest of the players aren’t receiving, this isn’t true. Since they are under NDA there are situations that they may hear info earlier or be a sounding board for ideas, but it is extremely infrequent. A lot of our communications happening with them in their forum is logistical (sharing their content, etc). Second, is the feeling that we weigh their feedback more than other players, which is also not true. The influencers are a great source of a snapshot of their community, so they can give us a feedback from a number of players at once. However, this in no way means that we weigh the feedback that comes from them differently then the feedback we receive here on the forums, on reddit, from PTS, social media, or any other sources.

 

I definitely hear the genuine concern though that we, BioWare, are not gathering your feedback as much as you want us to be. This is something that over the past year or so we have really made a lot of strides to improve and so the question I want to pose is how we can improve further! Let me talk about the various sources that we collect and respond to feedback, and based on that, let’s talk about how we can get better.

  • PTS – This is one of the places we have put some of the largest efforts. This started in earnest with 5.9.2. Once an update goes on PTS the team has been fairly ravenous in grabbing any and all feedback we can get. This goes from bugs to general change requests. We can’t always account for all feedback and sometimes it may be at odds with design goals, but the team works to change as much as we can before we launch it. We have similarly moved away from announcing specific launch dates so that we can work with you during PTS to get the update to a good place before going live.
  • Forum posts – In some cases we either won’t have enough time on PTS to get meaningful feedback or it isn’t something that will go on PTS at all. In these instances we have been trying to make detailed forum posts to highlight exactly what you can expect, so we can gather feedback even without your ability to get hands on (think of the Guild Perks posts).
  • General feedback – This is a constant stream of feedback coming from you, the players, to us. This comes from a large number of sources but primarily here on the forums, Reddit, and social media.
  • Planned feedback sessions – These can happen in a few different forms. We used to more prominently use PTS in a closed environment under NDA, although we have moved away from it. We also will host focus testing sessions. Most commonly these are in Austin but we have hosted them all over the world. They are hand-recruited sessions under NDA, typically very early in the process.
  • Data – This isn’t feedback, but, data is very important in our feedback cycle as we will compare the information we are receiving from any sources to what we are seeing in the behavior of players.

 

With all of that out there… how can we improve? I know our feedback loop is by no means perfect, but being able to gather your feedback consistently for each update on PTS has helped us quite a bit in getting direct feedback from you. Share your thoughts!

 

Thanks all.

 

-eric

 

Personally i think your influencer program is abit of a joke, i have played since beta and i have only known who 2 influencers were in that entire time. Those 2 influencers have been so out of whack with what genuine players want is unreal they pander to there streams which are normally between 40-120 watches which in a tiny tiny amount of your actual playerbase so cannot start to give you any real incite into anything, heck theres bigger guilds than viewer bases of these influencers so why are you not talking to guild leaders? they are the people who should be looking at being influencers.

 

Currently you have your influencer program set up to be full of yes men because heaven forbid someone should have a strong opinion that goes against biowares narritive.

 

Edit* To add some more feedback

 

1) Your new Ossus gearing system is a horrific grindfest nobody asked for and in some idiotic troll move to try and keep us grinding Ossus for longer you decided to bind things to weapon types so if i get 2 offhands on my operative i cant sent the mods on one to my smuggler because they are bound to a knife offhand only.

 

2) Ranked PVP is a mess its full of people wintrading, exploiting or just going afk to farm the new Ossus crystal and we report them and you answer tickets saying you cant tell us the outcome of your actions against them but we know you dont do anything because the ranked population is so small we see the same cheater, wintrader etc day in day out and if you had actually done something we wouldnt see them for a while.

Edited by mentalmackem
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I'm going to try to answer the question, even though I feel that a lot of the frustration is that specific feedback (for instance on the issues with 5.10 gearing and the lack of viable gearing routes for all players) has been soundly ignored.

 

A lot of players on both the PTS forum and here have given very detailed, very specific, polite feedback as to why they feel these changes are untenable.In that light I think a lot of players feel like they are screaming into the void and that even if they offer their opinions and experiences, it's futile.

 

- Solicit feedback directly from players. Don't make them come to you. Send surveys to all players (both F2P and paid) asking for specific feedback on issues, the content they've enjoyed playing, etc. In particular, reaching out to those who have let their subscriptions lapse (I know there's a place to say this on the form that one uses to discontinue credit card payments for subs but this doesn't cover people who buy paid time instead of ongoing subscriptions).

 

- Communicate on a regular basis. Let players know progress on major bugs. For instance with the current companion bugs, give players a sense of how close you are to fixing it. Keep communicating.

 

- Don't repeat things that have proven to be untenable/unpopular with players in the past. Again, no point in gathering feedback if it isn't used. For instance I'm not sure why it was thought that gating gear and decos behind Ops and trying to force players into them was considered a good idea after Iokath and Oricon didn't work. I'm sure there's raw data on how many people chose the dailies over Ops on Yavin 4, and how many abandoned the Oricon Ops and left the Iokath Op unplayed in their mission logs. That data seems like it should have resulted in different choices for gearing paths for 5.10.

Edited by IoNonSoEVero
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In my opinion, the Influencer program places too much focus on public personas (YouTubers/streamers and players active on social media), and not so much focus on in-game influencers like guild leaders and officers.

While the former help attracting new players for leveling and story content, you need the feedback of the latter to help with retention of endgame players.

I would even go as far as saying that guild leaders/officers have a much closer grasp of players' experiences because they directly talk with their guild members in voice chat, as well as with other guild leaders and with other players during PuG groups. Influencers will at most talk in social media and you cannot have any deep, meaningful conversations there (e.g. YouTube comments or Twitter feed).

 

So I would suggest to extend the Influencer program to guild leaders/officers as well to adequately represent all types of players, especially with SWTOR's renewed focus on endgame content since 5.2.

 

 

I also think that feedback is only useful in a small circle, which is why I appreciate PTS testing of niche content.

When a forum thread gets too long, there's too much noise to get the important points across. For example, the guild changes and guild perks have been an utter failure because there were too many players with too many different opinions. Myself, I didn't even participate because I didn't have the patience to read through all of it and didn't expect my feedback to make a difference with so many players.

On the other hand, with something like the Geonosian Queen ops boss, it is great being able to give detailed feedback that gets acted upon, though I'd've like one or two more groups giving feedback to ensure it is more neutral. But anything more than 3-4 different opinions and it becomes diluted.

 

Please continue doing open PTS. During closed PTS cycles, I was never able to test any of the group or guild stuff because the players on PTS were typically story players that refuse to group up. Meanwhile with open PTS, whenever I encounter a bug, I can always ask my guildie to hop on PTS or log onto my alt account to form a group. (Many of my guildies typically don't play much on PTS but they do keep it updated to the newest version and are always willing to help test, but obviously they won't get invited to closed PTS).

Edited by Jerba
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This post reminds me of something I spoke about before, the influencer paradox.

 

On one hand, you have the perception that the influencers are able to, well, influence. That influence would hypothetically extend to the player base and the "devs" themselves. This creates some feelings of exclusion from the player base at large who feel that feedback is being cherry-picked and that they are being ignored.

 

On the other hand, you have your post where you lay out how they really don't have anything much extra and you love feedback from all sources.

 

If the influencers have no influence then why are they influencers and if they do have influence why are they prioritised over other sources. These two realities cannot exist at the same time.

 

The term influencer is primarily a marketing and sales one, further feeding into what Musco has said several times himself over the years - the CM team is more an extension of the marketing department than what you would consider a "true" community management team. Obviously, there is some community interaction but let's be honest here, it's fractional.

 

So we have a group of people named after a marketing approach who the community at large mainly see promoting the game and not much else. You can see the criteria needed to become an influencer here https://imgur.com/a/Fz725XQ and it's really quite clear what the drive behind this program is.

 

Please stop confusing marketing with community management, for a start, your marketing team is nowhere near good enough to pull that off and it's just a very disingenuous approach to starting a dialogue with your player base.

 

Please stop telling us how much you love feedback when you've consistently ignored feedback from multiple sources (including every single one you listed above) on multiple occasions.

 

Please start having a real, non-marketing focused, community management team whose priority is to respond to the players taking their time to write out detailed and well thought out posts. I understand that a very large portion of posts on the forums are borderline insanity but there's also a good chunk that are just flat out ignored until some drama is created to prompt a generic non-specific response from you. Like what happened with this topic.

 

Please start taking actual action against topics that are brought up time and time again rather than this flash in the pan approach you have.

 

Here's one you've heard me say before Eric. Please stop dealing with the symptoms while ignoring the underlying problem causing them.

 

The community in this game is held together with glue, duct tape and giveaways. Please be better at managing the community.

 

Or don't, I'm not your mother.

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How to improve:

 

Aknowledge issues that keep coming up regulary, for example: mods locked in slots, solo player worries of new stuff requiring group play, companion issues. If many people are mad about something, make a post to thread and tell you are reading the complaints even you don't have answer yet. For example: "Hey, reading this and will tell more info as soon as i can"

 

And get answer as soon as possible for the ones that keep popping up.

For example: "Hey, we will change in future path these locked mods/Hey, we are not going to change this because of the reason X."

"Hey, we will be adding ways for solo players to get these things X in some point/Hey, we will not change how it is, because or the reason Y."

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Thank you for taking the time to get feedback on... well, feedback.

 

The main problem I have with the information we're given is that it doesn't address player impact. We're sometimes told what will be done, but then there is seldom follow-up on the response to that information. There might be clarifications, but If the initial post doesn't answer all of our questions, we're highly unlikely to find out until the next update. Unfortunately, that leaves some folks feeling like we're talking into a void.

 

The second biggest issue for me is that the information we're given is incomplete. Some of the least popular changes to the game were "ninja" changes, even to people participating in public testing. It didn't give us any chance to provide feedback before release. This game has a well-established history of seldom changing or fixing things after release, unless they are catastrophic issues, which puts more importance on being able to provide feedback before release.

 

On a related note, SWTOR also has a history of not including all changes in the patch notes. This causes us to make unpleasant (and sometimes pleasant) discoveries out of the blue. It also prevents the devs from getting credit for fixes, and doesn't let players know to stop avoiding things that were buggy in the past.

 

The third issue is a lack of setting of expectations. I can't remember many (if any) posts that said something like, "we'd love to do that but we can't", or "we can't do that for this reason", or "let's see how these changes work before we tackle that". At least for me, wondering if a feature will be implemented or a system will be adjusted is more frustrating than knowing it won't. It's also very aggravating and confusing to see thread after thread asking for a fix or feature without a response. Have you taken it under advisement? Scheduled it for a future patch? Ruled it out as a possibility? Or just ignored us completely? It's easy to assume the worst.

 

Finally, at least personally, I want to see some acknowledgement of ongoing issues, whether or not you can fix them. If nothing else, let us know we were heard and offer a little sympathy. It would be even better to hear that you plan to address it. Or perhaps just give me some closure that certain bugs will never be fixed so I can stop holding out for better days. The "known bug" list has been haphazard at best, so perhaps keeping on top of this and making it more complete would help.

 

 

TLDR: Let us know we've been heard, not just about major updates but on lesser topics as well. Don't be afraid of saying you don't know or it's bad news. At least in some cases, any news is better than silence. Sure, I might get aggravated at something you say, but I'll get over it. Slow burning resentment over silence is worse, and stops me from wanting to play or buy CCs.

 

(Oh, and hey, can the Strongholds forum get an icon, please? Do y'all even read that forum?)

Edited by Xina_LA
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Instead of asking us this question Eric, let me ask you...what type of feedback would Bioware like from us?

 

We've tried nice friendly posts. People have made threatening posts (with their sub). People have tried to give feedback in bullet points. Others have made detailed posts. Some even gather ALL the feedback they can and list it in a neat orderly manner for you to see ALL views on a topic easily...I've been here since beta...the only type of thread I've seen gain any traction and response from Bioware is MASS OUTRAGE...why the hell do we have to get to that point to get noticed by you???

 

What type of feedback does BIOWARE want from us??? What could we have done to get you to change the design of the new Huttball map? What type of feedback could we have given to make Conquest more alt friendly? What type of feedback would have prevented you from piece locking the new Ossus mods and enhancements? What can WE do to get you notice that we love your game and just want it to be the best it can be? We want to be here...we want the little things that make playing it more fun, we want it to get better...what type of feedback, besides mass outrage, gets noticed by you guys?

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But IPs and accounts that have been found seriously doing this multiple times should stop receiving chances.

IP bans? Seriously? Today? No.

 

If you ban by IP, you can end up banning one person, or you can end up banning me this week for something that he did last week (because both of us had a power cut, and my router got his old IP when it booted up). And of course the bad guy can merrily create a new account and get going again because now he has a "clean" IP.

 

Or you can end up banning an entire college dorm because of one person because of source NAT on the exit from the dorm to the Internet.

 

Or a random-sized chunk of the customers of an ISP that uses Carrier Grade NAT.

 

So no, IP bans are not a solution.

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IP bans? Seriously? Today? No.

 

If you ban by IP, you can end up banning one person, or you can end up banning me this week for something that he did last week (because both of us had a power cut, and my router got his old IP when it booted up). And of course the bad guy can merrily create a new account and get going again because now he has a "clean" IP.

 

Or you can end up banning an entire college dorm because of one person because of source NAT on the exit from the dorm to the Internet.

 

Or a random-sized chunk of the customers of an ISP that uses Carrier Grade NAT.

 

So no, IP bans are not a solution.

I wasn't talking about IP bans. I'm talking about wintraders/cheaters who use multiple accounts connected to ONE IP, computer, location, etc.

Edited by VaceDemon
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A lot of players on both the PTS forum and here have given very detailed, very specific, polite feedback as to why they feel these changes are untenable.In that light I think a lot of players feel like they are screaming into the void and that even if they offer their opinions and experiences, it's futile.

 

I'll expand on this a bit. If you take feedback, talk about it too. Especially in this specific case where the feedback says one thing and the update launches the other way. And I don't mean wait 3 moths to see how things settle before going back to it. By the time those three months have passed you've wasted any goodwill that came with the update and already lost anyone upset by it, and then it's too late. Talk about it. Explain things. This is how you can cut off the resentment before it builds. Sure, you'll have cynics and disagreements, but it comes with the territory. You can't please all the people all the time, but complete silence pisses everyone off. Resentment builds, trust erodes... That's not good for any relationship, business or otherwise. Communicate. Engage.

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I wasn't talking about IP bans. I'm talking about wintraders/cheaters who use multiple accounts connected to ONE IP, computer, location, etc.

You said "IPs".

But IPs and accounts that have been found seriously doing this multiple times should stop receiving chances.

(emphasis added)

 

The IP conceptually "connected" to a particular computer isn't normally *on* that computer(1), but deeper in the network, on the "outside" of a router that changes the addressing on packets that go by, the so-called "NAT" - Network Address Translation.

 

Sometimes that router is the box on your table with an ADSL/cable/fibre line on one side and an Ethernet / WiFi connection on the other, but sometimes that router is deeper into the network, serving your whole dorm, or your whole street, or half of your town, whatever. And in any event, the one your home router gets can change fairly easily. So what happens if Freddie down the street is a serial wintrader and gets your street's IP blocked?

 

(1) The computer *has* an IP of its own, but it's normally in one of the "private" ranges defined by RFC 1918, and most home routers use the same range, 192.168.1.*, on the "inside" part of the network. If you ban by the address on the player's PC, you ban half the player base.

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I wasn't talking about IP bans. I'm talking about wintraders/cheaters who use multiple accounts connected to ONE IP, computer, location, etc.

Unfortunately, SteveTheCynic is correct. Networks don't work the way they used to. It's impossible to target just one machine, or even one location. They'll have to be very diligent going after each account.

 

But yes, that's a bit beside the point.

 

Could there perhaps be a pair of big icons or buttons that are easy to find, one that would take us to the current Patch Notes and one that would take us to an up-to-date Known Bug List? Even if I didn't see a post addressing a bug, if it showed up in the Known Bug List, I'd relax knowing that y'all were aware of the issue.

 

Also, is posting a bug in the Bugs forum better or less effective than reporting a bug through the in-game interface?

 

And finally, when I report a problem through the in-game interface but get contact back from CS telling me it's not a bug, when it's clear they completely misunderstood what I was saying, am I simply out of luck? Replies to tickets and emails don't seem to get answered anymore.

Edited by Xina_LA
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Hey folks, I definitely hear the genuine concern though that we, BioWare, are not gathering your feedback as much as you want us to be. With all of that out there… how can we improve? I know our feedback loop is by no means perfect, but being able to gather your feedback consistently for each update on PTS has helped us quite a bit in getting direct feedback from you. Share your thoughts!

 

 

 

-eric

 

Hi Eric, thanks for entering the forums to discuss this topic. :p

 

The biggest complaint I personally have is the slow acknowledgement of people's concerns regarding new game changes that are viewed unfavorably by a lot of players, or the lack of acknowledgement of real gamebreaking issues in the game.

 

I realize that it's impossible for you or your team to directly communicate with every single player who complains or writes something critical of the game, but when a large group of people are making the same complaint a simple acknowledgement on the forums would go a long way.

 

An example of this is how ranked is filled with wintraders, quitters, etc. A very active discussion has been going on in the PVP section for weeks, even months about how the ELO system is manipulated and players are having their games ruined by cheaters who have a real lock down on the ranked matches now.

 

This is just an example of where some very passionate players are expressing their real concerns about how the game is being ruined for them due to the entire system of ranked scoring is not working due to cheaters. I personally don't participate in ranked much, but it's disheartening to see these very passionate players expressing their frustrations with absolutely no acknowledgement from anyone that could help them or at least acknowledge the problem is being looked into.

 

Maybe on your part, you feel it should be understood that of course you guys are trying to work on fixing the issues in ranked. To the players though, by not responding to anything written on that topic in that section it makes it seem like you guys don't care. The joke is that if you want to write something and not have it read by BW, write it in the PVP section because it's like a graveyard there for dead posts and threads. There are never any responses in yellow text there, ever. I just wonder why?

 

My point is, why not drop in to that section and let people know you guys hear them? Just one post letting them know you guys are reading what these players write would go a long way in assuaging their anger and disappointment at the present state of ranked and it's scoring system that is so easily manipulated. I don't think you understand how much a response from you or someone on your team means to the players here in all sections of the forums. (I speak for all the sections, not just the PVP section of course.)

 

By not responding to problems brought up in the forums, the anger of the players only snowballs, and then their anger at the problem initially written about turns to resentment for BW because it appears by not responding at all, you guys don't care. Then as time goes on, some players become apathetic to the problem, and either change activities in the game, or even worse quit. If it seems that the player's concerns are not valued, naturally players stop caring and/or playing.

 

I only use the ranked situation as an example, because there's a lot of discussion there that includes ideas on how to solve the problems of cheaters in ranked, and in my eyes it seems like if you guys are not reading those posts/threads you are missing a lot of potentially useful information and ideas on how to improve that part of the game.

 

I guess my main point is instead of letting resentment and anger build to a crescendo, a simple yellow texted post from you or someone on your team really would alleviate a ton of pressure that only builds as time goes on with no responses from you guys.

 

One reason the forums are not as active as they could be is that it really seems it's just a place where players can chat with one another about the game, but no one takes it seriously as a place where we can have meaningful interaction with you or anyone for that matter from BW.

 

 

My questions are:

 

 


  •  
  • Is it possible that you guys can be more active on the forums?
     
     
  • If it's not possible for you to be more active on the forums, is there a better platform where we can reach you and know that you are reading and taking in what we write?
     
     
  • If there is another platform for communication between players and BW for SWTOR, where/what is it?

 

 

I think what you are going to find is an immense influx of comments and concerns regarding this topic! I also believe initially it might seem overwhelmingly angry and frustrated here however in time if you guys just respond more frequently to the players on the forums you will find that posts will be far less critical and angry over time by simply responding to concerns instead of letting them fester and build over time.

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Unfortunately, SteveTheCynic is correct. Networks don't work the way they used to. It's impossible to target just one machine, or even one location. They'll have to be very diligent going after each account.

 

But yes, that's a bit beside the point.

I'd just like to say you are wrong about that. I've been banned on forums in the past for "ban evasion", or allegedly violating the same rules I allegedly did on previous accounts. It's easily traceable to see if someone's main account is connected to other accounts.

Edited by VaceDemon
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An example of this is how ranked is filled with wintraders, quitters, etc. A very active discussion has been going on in the PVP section for weeks, even months about how the ELO system is manipulated and players are having their games ruined by cheaters who have a real lock down on the ranked matches now.

This has actually been a problem for YEARS.

 

Backfilling was a form of cheating that took them 9 seasons to fix bc that method of cheating didn't leak to the general populace until around that time. It's pathetic that it was going on for so long before that and EAware's "metrics" never picked up on it.

 

There are still account-selling rings that are dedicated to selling accounts with multiple top 3 and gold-rated characters.

 

Bots are still being used.

 

I could go on and on. This company is so morally bankrupt that they can't afford to be monetarily bankrupt. They won't lose sub and cash shop money from these cheaters and wintraders so they opt to just suspend and rating reset at best and, "hope they will learn from the error of their ways" (Musco literally said this in a thread about wintrading in s9). They will never perma these guys bc their bottom line is at stake - and that's all they care about.

Edited by VaceDemon
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