Esteemed members of the GSF Community,

 

 

There is a potential for change in the not-too-distant future and I am appealing to all of you for your help and support in making this happen.

 

 

On Saturday, May 14th, Eric Musco held a Twitch stream that featured Michael Backus, lead technical designer for SWTOR. Michael Backus also happens to be the lead designer for Galactic Starfighter. The following is a transcript of Michael's response to a player requesting further development of GSF:

 

MICHAEL BACKUS: “I love Starfighter. It was an... actually, an amazing feat given how small the team was that got to work on it because we were working on other things at the same time--”.

 

<<Musco interjects, mentioning Shadow of Revan and Galactic Strongholds as the other projects that were developed concurrently with GSF. >>

 

“Uhm, but yeah, no, we had just a small team of--”

 

<<Musco interjects again with some off-topic commentary from the live chat and they joke around for a bit. >>

“...It was a very small team and we didn't even know if the engine could handle this free-flight, space... Uhm, so it was an incredible experience. Obviously there was still so much more I would love--have loved--to do with it. See, it was a great opportunity because I've always been a fan of, like, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter and Freelancer and all those free space PVP games and games that... came from Lucasarts back in the day. So, it was a great experience and I love it, and there's still—deep inside—I want to do more for it.”

 

ERIC MUSCO: “For anyone who is, like, 'Please bring us more Starfighter!', he is the lead designer on SWTOR now and was the lead designer on Starfighter. I can tell you this man loves Starfighter and if there is an opportunity to do more in Starfighter...”

 

BACKUS: “Yeah, It's about picking the right battles and making sure the people are letting us know what they want.”

 

MUSCO: “We were actually talking about… er, yesterday? At lunch we were talking about Starfighter. It was like, just this weekend.”

 

BACKUS: “Yeah, no it was.”

 

MUSCO: “So don't worry.”

 

BACKUS: “There are… you always talk about the 'Wall of Crazy'. There are definitely some things out there that, that… we would like to do to add to it. It's just a matter of priorities and what's best for the game.”

The Twitch stream can be found here: https://secure.twitch.tv/swtor/v/66376234 and the conversation begins at around 02:03:20.

 

Frankly, I'm a bit surprised this hasn't received more attention on the forums. Unless I am mistaken this is the most input on GSF we've received from the Dev team in a very, very long time. I may be overly optimistic but to me both Michael Backus and Eric Musco seem to be inferring that perhaps there is still some hope for GSF after all. With this revelation, along with a few other factors currently in play, it seems to be an ideal time to strike while the iron is lukewarm and make our collective voices heard. I propose we muster our forces and make a strong push during the entire month of June to tell Michael Backus and his dev team what we have been wanting, waiting and hoping for over the past 2 years. I think June is the perfect time to do this for the following 3 reasons:

 

 

 

1. Michael Backus's recent appointment as lead designer for all of SWTOR. Perhaps some of you were already privy to this information. I happen to find this news very encouraging considering some older posts on the forums claimed the original GSF team had left SWTOR long ago. The revelation that GSF's lead designer is now in charge of SWTOR's entire game design is a BIG DEAL. If ANYBODY on SWTOR's current Dev team can make something happen for GSF, it is going to be Michael Backus! GSF is his baby.
    
   
2. Double XP and Double Ship requisition this weekend. We will be undoubtedly seeing more people queuing up to take advantage of this incentive over the next 3 days. It is a golden opportunity for us to welcome them, invite them to join GSF chat, offer help or simply give them a few words of praise and encouragement. These things can go a long away toward boosting their morale and inspiring new players to keep queuing. I would love to see everyone capitalize on the momentum of this Double Ship Req weekend and use it as a springboard into this June promotion campaign.
    
   
3. Grand Galactic Starfighter Packs. Despite Dulfy having listed these as "items no longer available" in their last Weekly Sales post, the GSF pack is still available and has been moved to the Miscellaneous tab on the Cartel Market. Sustained sales of these packs might be the most direct way for us to communicate to the Devs that there is renewed interest and profit to be made in GSF. Over the next month, I encourage everyone to spend some Cartel Coins on purchasing a few Grand Starfighter packs. At 110 CC a pop, they won't break the bank and a spike in sales could help tip the scales in our favor. Subscribers have the added benefit of simply allocating their monthly 600 CC stipend toward purchasing a few packs. Despite a few minor bug issues these packs may be the strongest tool we have at our disposal for pulling GSF out of the abyss of neglect it has been in for the past 2 years. Keep the bigger picture in mind!
   

 

 

I wanted to offer my gratitude and appreciation to everyone, past and present, who has contributed to our community in a positive and constructive way. Thank you to all who regularly post here on the forums, who organize GSF events, stream matches, contribute informative guides and provide statistical data. In particular I wanted to offer my sincere thanks to Despon for his passion, dedication and perseverance in reaching out to lend new players a helping hand.

 

I have enlisted a few members of my guild to embark on a grassroots GSF campaign for the entire month of June to help promote and revitalize Galactic Starfighter on my home server of Begeren Colony. We are currently in the process of developing a few ideas that will work within our means while having some fun and reaching out to players who might be too intimidated or frustrated to queue up on their own.

 

I appeal to veteran guild masters, officers and solo players alike to help spread the word and embark on your own grassroots campaign to promote and support GSF on your server. GSF deserves a new lease on life. This is our fight and this is our goal. For every pilot promoting GSF on the forums and in general chat, there will be a hundred trolls tearing them down. I ask that you ignore the hate and focus on what is ultimately most important: the message. We are passionate about GSF. We desire more content. Our loyal and beleaguered community deserves to have it's voice heard and recognized.

 

Please lend your support and reply to this thread if you want to see more content for GSF!

 

 

It's time to queue up.

 

 

~Elaeis~

Begeren Colony

Edited May 30, 2016 by Sorrai

Good to hear, ofc, but as i remember, someone also was talking with devs about GSF on previous gamescom, devs promised to have a look at GSF, and nothing happened.... They even didnt fix bugs.

Elaeis,

 

Very good post. I don't watch the streams so had no knowledge of this, thank you for pointing it out. The talk they had over the weekend would have been interesting to hear. Over the course of the past few days, I and a bunch of friends have been leveling up lowbie toons, using the bonus exp/req to improve our ships. Haven't touched a main flier since it started.

I'll do what I can on Harbinger to bring more awareness of gsf to the general population of the server though. I have no toons on BC to help you there though. I wish you the best of luck.

Keep flying.

Post this in the General Discussion forums.

 

~ Eudoxia

some older posts on the forums claimed the original GSF team had left SWTOR long ago

 

Sure, but that's old news. If you watch some of the Bioware devs, you'll see that they often end up doing different things for different projects. This means that "all devs gone" doesn't need to be a permanent state at all.

 

 

The revelation that GSF's lead designer is now in charge of SWTOR's entire game design is a BIG DEAL.

 

Yes it is. No other part of the game is as abandoned as GSF is currently- not even raiding, which at least sees devs trying to tune old raids to still be fun (generally to jeers). And making a raid is vastly more expensive than anything being seriously discussed in the GSF community- it's a whole different beast.

 

Double XP and Double Ship requisition this weekend.

 

I don't think it will make much of a difference, but it might. If the double XP was just for GSF (and next weekend just for whatever other thing, etc.) then we might see a push into the game mode. But double XP mostly grants double-stuff to people in a way designed NOT to push them into certain content. When story XP was ludicrously buffed, that definitely reduced people running content that wasn't that, etc.

 

these packs may be the strongest tool we have at our disposal for pulling GSF out of the abyss of neglect it has been in for the past 2 years. Keep the bigger picture in mind!

 

 

I don't want to encourage people to dump a bunch of money at this or anything, but it is worth pointing out that, hey, if you want some cool new cosmetics, these packs have some. But don't think you are crowdfunding GSF or anything

 

 

 

 

Anyway, I think the combination of the cosmetic pack and the open discussion of GSF means that we'll see something happen, at some point.

I'm not sure if buying GSF Cartel items is a signal to do anything other than release more GSF Cartel items.

 

If it were a cartel, "Dev time token," then I'd happily dump my entire stockpile of cartel coins on it, and consider buying more, but after getting a paintjob that was either broken or mislabeled, I'm not keen on spending more for art asset unlocks. I want game mechanic unlocks as it were.

 

Probably the best thing is for subscribers who like GSF to spend more time in it, help introduce other people to it, and for non-subs who are into GSF to spend on the access unlocks for it.

 

Playing GSF and paying to play it are the strongest signals for GSF development being worth time and effort for Bioware. Expand the playerbase. Community events, regular narrated stream, GSF schools, and general community building.

 

On the upside, in terms of population stability, GSF feels like it's much more composed of die-hards than other areas of game play, and that getting recruitment rates to be above attrition rates might be more workable than for most other areas of the game. The downside is starting from such a small base population.

 

At any rate, an extra effort to grow the community sounds great. I think we'll need to keep it up past the end of June though.

"Dev time token"

 

TBH this would be the best thing ever. It would give actual meaning to the phrase "vote with your wallet." I know raiders who would dump hundreds of dollars buying "ops dev time tokens."

 

But then it could also become a pissing contest between those who don't like ops, those who have the most money to burn, and even turn the game into "pay 2 win" in a way. It's just as bad of an idea as it is good of an idea, IMO.

 

~ Eudoxia

Edited May 28, 2016 by FlavivsAetivs

TBH this would be the best thing ever. It would give actual meaning to the phrase "vote with your wallet." I know raiders who would dump hundreds of dollars buying "ops dev time tokens."

 

But then it could also become a pissing contest between those who don't like ops, those who have the most money to burn, and even turn the game into "pay 2 win" in a way. It's just as bad of an idea as it is good of an idea, IMO.

 

~ Eudoxia

 

For as long as it's not the same Devs who work on Operations, GSF, WZs, Story, etc it won't become a bad idea to have a purchasable token. However the token must be purchasable with real money not cartel coins and the money must go to the intended development team (i.e. money given for GSF development go to GSF dev team and all other devs get nothing).

 

All BioWare would need to do is to have a section on the website with target amount for new content that people can vote for (i.e. GSF: New Map vs Ship Balance) where each option would have description what they promise to deliver. Make in-game pop-ups as they did in open beta to reach all who engage in a specific game mode (i.e. after completion of a GSF match) and let people vote.

 

After people voted what they want devs to deliver - allow people to start making contributions and track it on the website (similar to Kickstarter way). Once the budget amount is reached - dev team responsible for that section of content will receive the money and start delivering.

Yeah, like Kickstarter or Gofundme or whatever. That's actually a great idea.

 

~ Eudoxia

If it were a cartel, "Dev time token," then I'd happily dump my entire stockpile of cartel coins on it, and consider buying more

I so completely wish they would sell "Dev Time Token: GSF" because I would do the same exact thing. Then I would feel like I haven't been wasting my subscription money, which is the way -coincidentally- that I currently feel.

 

As thrilled as I was to suddenly have the ability to give my Republic ships on one character a Yellow-and-Gray paintjob, I would feel a thousand times better getting nothing but the assurance that I bought enough Dev Time for them to perform a maneuver more advanced than setting an RGB value. Like, for instance, changing a number on Strike Fighters. Speaking of which, incidentally, it was pointed out to me that today is the first birthday of the abandoned Strike Fighter Changes thread. Happy birthday, thread! Live long and prosper. We will always remember the brave admission of guilt the developers made in their sole visit to this forum for a two year span... which they then promptly shelved for a year of inaction.

 

Expand the playerbase. Community events, regular narrated stream, GSF schools, and general community building.

I apologize for being a force for disillusioned negativity, but I must point out that the GSF School concept failed utterly to expand the player base. Even in my most outreach-y moment, posting in the general forum advertising a week in advance, bumping the thread daily, and being civil to people while they were slagging GSF resulted in a couple pats on the back from disinterested bystanders and precisely zero people who cared enough to try to learn the game.

 

I appreciate the plaudits from those of you who don't think I destroyed the game by educating people to play in a way that forestalled their continual demise and maybe enabled them to play a bit better. I am glad it helped a few people, and that is a victory on a small scale. On the larger scale, though, it failed. Hard.

 

I'll try to be constructive now...

 

People who care about GSF will not be reached on the general forum. The people in that forum either are indifferent or hostile to GSF, because it is not the kind of game they signed up for.

 

If some sort of outreach program were to exist, it would only find success if it approached people who particularly enjoy arcade style space shooters (NOT space sims... if you want a tall glass of bile, try to get someone who swears by their flightstick to play GSF) and lured them into either tolerating or ignoring the MMO part of SWTOR to play GSF.

 

Look outside the locked, tightly lidded box that is the current GSF community.

 

Try to get people who play Star Conflict to play GSF, too. Find people who blog about space combat games and get them to talk about the hidden gem stuck in SWTOR. Get coverage on gaming sites like RPS, Polygon, massivelyop.com somehow. There's a story to be told about a game that has been abandoned but sports a loyal enough fanbase to keep playing it two years later.

 

The core of veteran players is GSF at this point. The only reason the game is played at all is because we keep queuing. Without the veterans, you get servers like Bastion where you might see a pop once every few hours, if you're lucky. People can't even learn the game on well over half of the servers now because there are no matches, and you need to play a lot to get good at it.

 

I proposed a crowdfunded drive to get more GSF content a long time ago, btw. It would require cooperation from Bioware, so...

 

- Despon

Edited May 29, 2016 by caederon

More gsf!!

Bump !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Any further development on GSF would be more than welcome! Perhaps I am a minority, but as a casual gamer, I find that I can both meaningfully compete in GSF, in contrast to other PVP content (I humbly admit), and relatively easily set aside the time for a session, something that is almost impossible for me to do for an operation. Also, I rather enjoy speeding around in space. I wish there were a bit more variety, though!

 

Ideally, GSF would offer a meaningful solo mode, tied to a larger quest line, where people can get hooked to free flying space combat, and learn the basics, before entering the PVP content, which also could use some expansion, of course. E.g., there are nice, dynamic ground PVP maps, why are the space maps all so extremely static?

 

GSF may have started as an interesting side project, but right now it seems to have been too readily abandoned. I believe that enough work went into it already to give it a lot of potential, and (speaking as a scientist with a lot of programming work) it might be a fun project for the developers as well.

Edited June 20, 2016 by Aenear