Devs at the latest cantina: Class Story, not at the moment...

There are industry standards for development houses. They might fluctuate but its not 100s of employees. They are usually small, expert teams. 3-4 people working in matrix groups per team.

I did write a long post here but it went missing simply put, I have worked in corp development for a long time, and the facts are all that senior management teams worry about are bonuses and salary raises/promotion. No exec is going to sign off huge expenditures because it is the right thing to do/people ask for it. Execs make decisions based on facts:

1) Will it make money
2) Will it save money
3) If we don't do it will it damage our reputation

Class stories fall into none of them (no study shows people come back on additional stories to MMOs, nor do they encourage new people).

If you want Eric to walk into a meeting saying "Hey I have this great idea from the forums", you better give him some damn good evidence to go in with. Execs will rip him a new ahole if he walks in without facts/figures/papers, etc.

You can all ***** and whine all you want about how some people are negative, positivity gets you nowhere in the corp world, provable benefits and action do.

If you want to get them to do something (as evidenced by GSF, Housing, etc):

1) Make the content you want have a monetisation path. If they think by spending x on housing, you will spend y on stuff to go in it and y>x, then you will get x
2) Lower the risk for Bioware. Get everybody to sign up to a project where they give money upfront. I am thinking Kickstarter here, if you can get 20,000 people to put in $50 for new class stories, I guarantee you will get some kind of response.


I want more class stories, but ignoring the fact that they are corporates is foolish, everything Bioware has done outside the yearly content of planets and FPs has been monetised, or a giveaway on the back of monetising.. You can stick your head in the sand and hope, or you can make the decision easy for the Bioware Execs (I have played this game for years, and in fact been at the Exec level).

My personal opinion the CM team have been working on 1) and 2). They will have been able to justify this on the basis that they will be able to sell the fluff through the CM.

I know what you're getting at. We've discussed it before. I agree completely. I'd like little bits and pieces of story that add up over time. I mean, sure, I'd like it all in one big bang, too, but I would be over the moon just to get a taste.

The CM team is a bunch of artists and animators. Implementing 1 and 2 requires a vastly different skill set than that.

Unless you mean the team funded by CM and that it has real developers on it, too?

Yeah that's what I what I really meant, is that they will have brought in developers from the matrix organisation, funded by the CM to do the "content". I wasn't clear about that.

There is nothing supporting that. Normally the teams are separated by the "goal".

Oh, there is definitely teams running in parallel. We know for sure the Cartel Market is its own separate entity from the main game development, for instance.

But there is definitely some sort of breakdown - I admit it is purely my own speculation on whether its team size.

But what it could be to me is either team size that focuses on the questing side of things, or perhaps it is simply a misallocation of resources and bad planning. It's entirely possible they just decided to chuck almost everyone they got at developing the next expansion planet, aside from the systems (including housing here), PvP and GSF teams.

But the issue is one of expecting people to just wait until the next big release for quest content, which thus far has been an annual occurance +.

I think for a gaming company that's an unrealistic expectation to ask your playerbase to wait, unless what you put out is significantly larger than makeb.

So however they need to do it, they need to have at least something for the questing community throughout the year to tide them over.


My hope is they already know this, based on the Producer letter, where they said the new story will unfold over many updates. My fear is that how it unfolds will be all flashpoints and operations, which is reasonable to expect because it's how they have handled story in the past in between the stretches. But flashpoints and operations aren't going to be the elixir that makes the majority of the story questing people wait for the new content - its a miscalculation.

We can only wait and see now, and see if they wised up and have story quest content now in the pipeline ready to be released at more regular intervals.

What do you think the goal is? How do you think the team justified making the GSF or housing? You are right I have no evidence, but it would seem to make a lot of sense based on your average corp, that I go into a meeting as the game "owner", and say I think we should do GSF. Execs go "woah", ***, you want to spend how much. I turn around and say yes, I have made X money in the CM, and if we spend y on the GSF, then we will likely make z on upgrades, paint, vehicles. Evidence from CM sales shows z>y, and that team gets brought into build GSF alongside the cm team, and then goes back to something else.

Its extremely REALISTIC to ask your player base to wait. Nothing can be created instantaneously.

More content is coming, you have to wait for it.