*tries to remain skeptical*

 

*gets hopes up again like a child*

 

 

Damn it.

There there, it'll be ok. Surely Bioware wouldn't lie to us again (ie: and I quote, "we'll see content rolling out on a monthly basis" ~ Ohlen, end quote), or present us with more half-truths, or re-introduce us to the new new new NEW Community support team...., Right Vertias?

Hi there, Its nice to see the amount of communication here.

First, let me say that I fully understand the limit to the amount of information that you can provide about developing content. It is certainly a let down to people too not tell them about ideas as soon as they pop out of your designers heads and on to paper, but it would be much worse too promise content before it has a chance to be refined and revised.

The one issue that I would like to bring up however is the lack of feed-back in the class forums. If possible could you please explain the proses of how your team handles class feed back.

The reason that I and much of the community find this area to be a particularly disappointing area to not receive feed back in is: That all future content aside many of the class in-balances can create problems for players with the content they already have. Due to to competitive nature of level 50 pvp teams and limit of spots in an operation, often which class a person is playing can make or break their chances at fully experiencing level 50 content. Sometimes leaving them with only the alternatives to either re-spec and re-gear (often into a roll they don't want) or re-roll as whole different class.

Furthermore it is also one of the first places people will check before buying the game, too decided what type of character they might like to try. The last thing their going to want to see is that the class type they want to play is being utterly ignored. So even if theres a class with no complaints (unlikely as it may be ) a post once a week for every advanced class to let subscribers know your paying attention would be highly appreciated.

Thank you for your time, and I hope to hear back from you.

I think one thing that would help a lot is some sort of issue tracker with a list of issues and a status (reported / accepted / confirmed / in dev / fixed) managed by one of you (ie only read access to us).

I believe that seeing bug reports shoved under the rug by the typical in-game message (no further communication etc) is quite discouraging especially to a casual player with a little or no knowledge of the process how bugs are fixed. A clear and concise list of issues would go a long way. Mods could easily link to them here on forums and I as a player could at least see that my feedback is actually worth something.

BioWare are you ever going to fix when the instance depopulates and we get locked out for a 1/2 hour then have to re-clear EC trash?

This error "[server Admin]: Permission to enter on he1036, access denied: could not move player to selected area"

This has been a problem for months and nothing is ever said or done about it. I would think this is a major issue....

It's good to hear you guys are wanting to interact with the community more, it's something I definitely feel has been lacking pretty much since the game launched, certainly since Stephen Reid was let go.

For reference, I came here from City of Heroes, a game where the Community Managers and Developers really know how to make the community feel part of the game. From a high level of participation on the forums to a weekly hour long Twitch tv show with the lead CM they put a lot of effort into involving the players.

Granted the two game communities are quite different, they have a significantly lower percentage of juvenile trolls to deal with, but I look forward to seeing how you manage to improve the two-way conversation between the player base and the BioWare staff.

Good luck, I think you're going to need it.

It's good to hear you guys are wanting to interact with the community more, it's something I definitely feel has been lacking pretty much since the game launched, certainly since Stephen Reid was let go.

 

For reference, I came here from City of Heroes, a game where the Community Managers and Developers really know how to make the community feel part of the game. From a high level of participation on the forums to a weekly hour long Twitch tv show with the lead CM they put a lot of effort into involving the players.

 

Granted the two game communities are quite different, they have a significantly lower percentage of juvenile trolls to deal with, but I look forward to seeing how you manage to improve the two-way conversation between the player base and the BioWare staff.

 

Good luck, I think you're going to need it.

Night and day between here and there isn't it.

JG. Good luck trying to steer this ship. I haven't played in two months, actually came over to cancel my sub, and saw your post. I'll give it another month.

Mr. Joveth Gonzalez, can you, please, post Bioware`s definition of "new content" here?

Do a pair of glasses or a new orange weapon qualify as new content?

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.

I'm sorry but we all know the Q&A is mostly useless. It's more like a garbage collector than else.

Look, most people don't even care anymore reading it, not to speak posting questions regarding what comes out of it either.

The questions that matters for most, are still waiting for answers and your fire and forget behavior doesn't work either. The devs needs to drop into the QA and actually discuss with the players.

In its actual state you should be ashamed to call the Q&A the best place to ask questions.

While you guys, from the communication team, are only telling what you are authorized to, the issues still lies in the execs (producer and so) and I can say they still do not get it.

Speaking of the future, you have a very simple and clear track to make the game successfull:

 

1) Before anything else: start communicating with the fans in a two way fashion.

.......Not only exchange with them before it's too late to change features, based on player's feedback.

.......But also make sure to dig through the suggestion forums and have devs drop by and discuss with the players.

As long as you keep with the "until finished" and "can't speak about that now" or "great features to come" you'll fail. Not only the communication did not improve but it's getting worse than ever.

(edit)

If you have any questions, thoughts, or ideas, please feel free to send us an email at community@swtor.com. You can also send me a PM here on the forums or reach me on Twitter @joveth. These are three different ways for you to get in touch. We will limit important announcements to only occur on our site, forums, our Facebook page, and/or the official SWTOR Twitter account.

No, people don't want their comments get lost in the void.

They post on the forums. It's where questions, comments, suggestions goes and so should the devs. Doing a 2 way communication.

As long as you keep with the "until finished" and "can't speak about that now" or "great features to come" you'll fail. Not only the communication did not improve but it's getting worse than ever.

+∞

Healthy procedure should be:

1- Explain idea to cumminity

2- Get feedback

3- Modify on appropiate

4- Push it to test server

5- Get test server feedback

6- Modify on appropiate

7- Push to live

Its not like inventing the wheel, isn't it?

+∞

 

Healthy procedure should be:

 

1- Explain idea to cumminity

2- Get feedback

3- Modify on appropiate

4- Push it to test server

5- Get test server feedback

6- Modify on appropiate

7- Push to live

 

Its not like inventing the wheel, isn't it?

Sadly doesn't work with designers and producers that have huge ego or are clueless and think they know better than the players what they really need.

Yeah it doesn't make it with Leia...

All right! Big list of responses today. I'll do my best here.

Well due to a website issue i lost the original post i tried to put up earlier today.. so I apologize for the brevity of this rehash.

 

Joveth..

 

Pure and simple i've been losing faith that Bioware cares about this game at all steadily since about February.

 

A few things the community team can do to help rebuild some consumer confidence for me;

 

1... Really dive into the forums and integrate with the players. Even simple little responses like 'food for thought, i'll bring it up with the devs." to any number of the suggestions players give is better than leaving us all wondering if your team actually exists. And it doesn't have to be strictly related to game, I'm sure we'd all welcome the CM team and Devs alike into the discussions about what we had for breakfast, or who is the best Rodian in the SW universe. just make your team's presence KNOWN.

 

2... Centralize the information on SWTOR.com. It's great that you guys have twitter and facebook accounts and whatnot, but for those of us trying to keep up with the changes, having to scour 85 different sites is trying at best. When there's relevant discussions on twitter, mirror them on SWOTR's forums. When there's a new announcement, put it in the forums, and then link it from your twi/fb acct or whatever, not the other way around as sometimes happens.

 

3... More guided feedback conversations. The current practice seems to be: team creates a post that requests specific feedback, we respond... x days later thread gets locked with a "thank you for participating message". I realize there's probably other things occupying time, but still having a more interactive discussion (similar to this thread with your regular responses) engenders a LOT of goodwill from my perspectve. If you can get each dev to take 20 min out of their day for 1 pet project thread each, I think you'd get an overwhelmingly positive response from teh players.

 

4... This one is an usual suggestion, but bear with me. Hold your dev's accountable. If there is a BIG issue that's affecting a large number of players, figure out who's responsible and let us know that you know there's an issue and it's been brought up to the correct team, assigned to specific team member, who is currently working on a fix. Seriously, I'd adore that kind of post. because it illustrates to me a number of things... 1.. the post hasn't fallen on deaf ears... 2... it shows that you're doing your job by taking community concerns to the devs... 3... it informs US that the correct team is aware of the issue... and 4... it informs us that the issue is having a resolution worked on.

 

Thanks!

 

TLDR version.... in short.... spend more time letting us know that you're here doing your job, rather than just popping in once a month to say you are. because the other 27 days, effectively MY perception is your team doesn't exist.

Ok Blisst_uNF, in order:

1. Yep. This is definitely something we can do. The problem sometimes is finding a thread to post in. We'll do our best going forward.

2. Most important news and updates can be seen on either http://www.swtor.com/info/news and http://www.swtor.com/blog. These two sites should cover most major information. Additionally, I try to push this as much as possible, but the Dev Tracker is also a powerful tool. We use the official SWTOR Twitter and FB accounts as an additional outlet for news that already appears on our main site. Relevant discussions can happen anywhere, and it will be a difficult process to keep track of and reproduce them in one centralized place. I'll try to see what we can do, but this will be difficult to do.

3. This is actually in the works. Keep an eye out for these interactions in the near future.

4. We do do this internally. Amber has a daily list that she escalates up to the responsible development teams. In the future, we can work on finding and updating threads more consistently to let players know that we're either aware, investigating, or coming up with a solution.

I thank you for your time at trying to communicate with the community, it's an important part of customer relations, and I look forward to the increased interaction (blew up the dev tracker today!). I think a great thing you could do is what Georg did, and drop little hints at undiscovered ingame secrets, I felt that it really brought the community together and ignited a lot of cooperation trying to hunt and figure out his cryptic clues.

 

The guild summit was also very informative, and a great thing, As a guildmastro myself, I hope more interaction and support of guilds is coming in this new plan.

 

Thanks.

We'll definitely be working closer with devs to make sure that these sort of interactions continue.

the weekly Q&A is a joke. we are lucky if 1/10 questions is actually something more complex than "what color lighsabers can i get?"

 

whoever is in charge of picking the questions NEVER chooses the ones we would most like to know the answers to. the interaction between devs/employees and players has been laughably atrocious. like others have said in this thread, can we get less communication about communicating, and more communication about the actual game? this is literally the 3rd of 4th time we've been "introduced" to the community team.

We've heard your feedback regarding the Q&A and we think that we've come up with a better solution, such as increasing daily developer interactions and publishing THOSE responses on a weekly basis.

Enough promises. Pls deliver

Will do!

Hi there, Its nice to see the amount of communication here.

 

First, let me say that I fully understand the limit to the amount of information that you can provide about developing content. It is certainly a let down to people too not tell them about ideas as soon as they pop out of your designers heads and on to paper, but it would be much worse too promise content before it has a chance to be refined and revised.

 

The one issue that I would like to bring up however is the lack of feed-back in the class forums. If possible could you please explain the proses of how your team handles class feed back.

 

The reason that I and much of the community find this area to be a particularly disappointing area to not receive feed back in is: That all future content aside many of the class in-balances can create problems for players with the content they already have. Due to to competitive nature of level 50 pvp teams and limit of spots in an operation, often which class a person is playing can make or break their chances at fully experiencing level 50 content. Sometimes leaving them with only the alternatives to either re-spec and re-gear (often into a roll they don't want) or re-roll as whole different class.

 

Furthermore it is also one of the first places people will check before buying the game, too decided what type of character they might like to try. The last thing their going to want to see is that the class type they want to play is being utterly ignored. So even if theres a class with no complaints (unlikely as it may be ) a post once a week for every advanced class to let subscribers know your paying attention would be highly appreciated.

 

Thank you for your time, and I hope to hear back from you.

Thanks for this! We just recently finished up our last round of class feedback (we posted stickies in each class forum on the perception for each class). This feedback has been taken back to the designers, who are now digesting all of it. Your feedback will definitely contribute to their decisions in the future.

Additionally, we will be requesting MORE feedback soon, so keep an eye on the class forums for that.

I think one thing that would help a lot is some sort of issue tracker with a list of issues and a status (reported / accepted / confirmed / in dev / fixed) managed by one of you (ie only read access to us).

 

I believe that seeing bug reports shoved under the rug by the typical in-game message (no further communication etc) is quite discouraging especially to a casual player with a little or no knowledge of the process how bugs are fixed. A clear and concise list of issues would go a long way. Mods could easily link to them here on forums and I as a player could at least see that my feedback is actually worth something.

This document is already managed internally and maintained by us. Keeping track of every single bug reported is no easy task, to be sure. It'd be unrealistic to have this document publicly, but we DO make sure to address major bugs and issues with the Known Issues thread (maintained by Amber).

BioWare are you ever going to fix when the instance depopulates and we get locked out for a 1/2 hour then have to re-clear EC trash?

 

This error "[server Admin]: Permission to enter on he1036, access denied: could not move player to selected area"

 

This has been a problem for months and nothing is ever said or done about it. I would think this is a major issue....

Thank you for this. We are currently aware of this issue and it was escalated internally.

Hi joveth, are you our main point of contact now like SR was previously ?

Yes, but feel free to reach out to the rest of the team as well. They don't bite. For the most part.

All right! Big list of responses today. I'll do my best here.

Thanks for this! We just recently finished up our last round of class feedback (we posted stickies in each class forum on the perception for each class). This feedback has been taken back to the designers, who are now digesting all of it. Your feedback will definitely contribute to their decisions in the future.

 

Additionally, we will be requesting MORE feedback soon, so keep an eye on the class forums for that.

I`m sorry, but players should not have any saying in class balance. Each "main" will try to buff its class and nerf the others... and subjective feedback is not really what`s needed.

So, please, use your "metrics", IF they exist.. and do your OWN balancing, based on whatever "targets" your classes do or do not achieve. ASSUMING you folks actually test and not theorycraft all day.

Also, make up your mind. Have the classes in a final draft and leave them like that. FOTM will exist... but it`s better than creating one each 2 months for cheap rerolls.

[EDIT]Also, can you, please, post Bioware`s definition of "new content" here?

Do a pair of glasses or a new orange weapon qualify as new content?

Yes, but feel free to reach out to the rest of the team as well. They don't bite. For the most part.

 

For the most part huh? lol. So they have been known to bite? lol Well in that case make sure they are current on their shots.

I wonder how long the community manager will stay... sorry if I sound disheartening, but so far every community manager has become a huge disappointment for me so I took it well to see them go (and I am just not a very optimistic person in general).

Nevertheless I have a request, could you please tell the devs that they really should look into the codex and make it work (fix those which a meant to be available and remove those entirely which aren't, so that people actually can get a 100% completion on this).

I`m sorry, but players should not have any saying in class balance. Each "main" will try to buff its class and nerf the others... and subjective feedback is not really what`s needed.

 

So, please, use your "metrics", IF they exist.. and do your OWN balancing, based on whatever "targets" your classes do or do not achieve. ASSUMING you folks actually test and not theorycraft all day.

 

Also, make up your mind. Have the classes in a final draft and leave them like that. FOTM will exist... but it`s better than creating one each 2 months for cheap rerolls.

 

[EDIT]Also, can you, please, post Bioware`s definition of "new content" here?

 

Do a pair of glasses or a new orange weapon qualify as new content?

The only guy who understood the telemetry numbers no longer works for EA.

I'd alter the request for a definition of content to instead ask all EA communications to go one more level deeper into detail than they currently do. "Soon" becomes a quarter or a month. "Content" becomes "flashpoint" or "operation" or "warzone" or "cash shop stuff". That sort of thing.

Dear Joveth,

This is day two of your New New plan, New New because its exactly same Old New plan annuounced to us some weeks ago (6-7 weeks if alzheimer is not hitting me too hard).

Yesterday was Day 1, Todat is Day 2, in this 2 days we have got:

(Dev posts classification for a total of 39 posts)

Maintenance related: 3

Annoucements not game related: 2

Promises: 13

Not game related chit chat with comunity members: 7

"Have nothing new to say" type: 14

Do you see my point? i want to believe you and your new plan, but please, leave your PC, go to Developers room, get them by the XXXXXXXXX and force them to share their secret knowledge regularly, we dont need you and Allison ninja posting useless comments on the forums, while we do appreciate the effort, we want real communication with the development team.

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.

We've only read this same speel 3 or 4 times now.

Pardon me if I voice the opinion that this rings more hollow each time I read it, sorry, but you're not convincing.

I`m sorry, but players should not have any saying in class balance. Each "main" will try to buff its class and nerf the others... and subjective feedback is not really what`s needed.

 

So, please, use your "metrics", IF they exist.. and do your OWN balancing, based on whatever "targets" your classes do or do not achieve. ASSUMING you folks actually test and not theorycraft all day.

 

Also, make up your mind. Have the classes in a final draft and leave them like that. FOTM will exist... but it`s better than creating one each 2 months for cheap rerolls.

Of course our team uses internal metrics! Community feedback just is just one part of the process.

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.

Sometimes you don't have any information? You must be kidding. And even if this was true, it'd be time to kick the devs' butts or there won't be anything left to keep still about much longer.

Sorry for my bad english, but I'm no native speaker... =/

Do you see my point? i want to believe you and your new plan, but please, leave your PC, go to Developers room, get them by the XXXXXXXXX and force them to share their secret knowledge regularly, we dont need you and Allison ninja posting useless comments on the forums, while we do appreciate the effort, we want real communication with the development team.

Going to file this advice under "How to get myself fired in less than an hour."

I`m sorry, but players should not have any saying in class balance. Each "main" will try to buff its class and nerf the others... and subjective feedback is not really what`s needed.

 

So, please, use your "metrics", IF they exist.. and do your OWN balancing, based on whatever "targets" your classes do or do not achieve. ASSUMING you folks actually test and not theorycraft all day.

 

Also, make up your mind. Have the classes in a final draft and leave them like that. FOTM will exist... but it`s better than creating one each 2 months for cheap rerolls.

 

[EDIT]Also, can you, please, post Bioware`s definition of "new content" here?

 

Do a pair of glasses or a new orange weapon qualify as new content?

You could not be more wrong sir ! class balance have been a disaster after 1.2 and that is not because metrics

do the job,to know the classes and how they perform one must play the game on a competetive lvl something

few if any developers do.There is a reason why so many AC in SWTOR is not wanted in good rated teams.

Sure some will try to claim this and that on the forum who is clueless or just want to see theyr class stay OP

but alot of the feedback is most valid and when bioware ignored all the feedback from players on PTS for 1.2 and 1.3 that was a huge mistake ans see now how many have left because their class in no fun or competetive.