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Meet the Developers: Jonathan Crow


CourtneyWoods

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I like these articles, it's great to find out about the people behind the game.

 

Sometimes when you're playing an MMO you think that the devs are:

 

- Deliberately and maliciously ignoring the playerbase

- Doing their best to sabotage which ever part of the game that you love

 

...When of course, that's simply not the case i.e. they're professionals doing their best on what must be an incredible complex game.

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Jonathan Crow,

I saw you said you analyzed PvE operations statistics - kill to death ratios, dps/healing/mitigation numbers, etc, - so Im guessing you might also dabble in the numbers surrounding PvP too. If you could possibly expose some of those numbers to the community, there would surely be some great discussions here on the forums from those numbers.

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1. Monitoring the health of the game via a series of dashboards that we developed to track some of the important key performance indicators for the game (keeping track of daily logins, game economy, engagement in Operations and Warzones, etc)

 

PLS, knock to head developers who are tracking LAG spikes: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=545658 and http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=559510 :rak_02::mad:

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Good interview. I'm glad you are able to work in an area you enjoy and hope your passion for gaming can continue to contribute to improving the game.

 

I noticed you mentioned SQL, and of course relational databases have been around forever. However, you also said you do a lot of sc****** of social media sites, etc. Have you looked at using an XML database like Mark Logic or BaseX as a repository for unstructured data that will be used in analytics? I've done some "big data" work and have found XML databases to be much more flexible than table based relational databases.

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According to the chart most time is spent on fleet??

 

Whoa there really should be some minigames and a PvP arena there.

 

Well, I for one add to the fleet time. When I'm essentially not gaming, I stand on the fleet just to send out my companions to craft and gather every 30 ~ 60 mins.

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First of all - that was an excellent interview. I particularly liked the sample chart of playtime presented. I do have a couple comments and questions though:

 

My guild <Esoteric Order> uses the Ziost to role-play on Jung Ma fairly often, and It's pretty common to find RP'ers scattered about the imperial fleet. Although we're probably a small portion of the population, it hit me when I was reading your chart that we might be represented as idling in fleet when in fact we're having some of our peak entertainment role-playing . That leads into my first question:

 

What are the most common hotspots for role-play? (Perhaps an analysis of which areas people tend to use the /e command or the say channel would provide a rough estimate of where people tend to role-play).

 

Also, what's the most interesting, 'fun' statistic you discovered while analyzing SWTOR?

Edited by Flightsaber
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"This event had the desired effect of getting people to leave the Fleet and go run about the galaxy mingling with other players of various levels."

Jonathan Crow

 

Wouldn't dispersement/copying of unique Fleet services to other planets, get "people to leave the Fleet'?

 

Such as expanding the existing services on Ilum, Coruscant, Dromond Kaas. Adding the unique services to the daily areas on Corellia and Belsavis, and the four starter planets. And allowing the planetary flashpoint shuttles to take people directly to the flashpoint, like the Black Hole, Belsavis, etc. transport take people to daily areas.

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"This event had the desired effect of getting people to leave the Fleet and go run about the galaxy mingling with other players of various levels."

Jonathan Crow

 

Wouldn't dispersement/copying of unique Fleet services to other planets, get "people to leave the Fleet'?

 

Such as expanding the existing services on Ilum, Coruscant, Dromond Kaas. Adding the unique services to the daily areas on Corellia and Belsavis, and the four starter planets. And allowing the planetary flashpoint shuttles to take people directly to the flashpoint, like the Black Hole, Belsavis, etc. transport take people to daily areas.

 

haha, yeah. BioWare is the one who made Fleet the hub and now they want people to leave Fleet? Me, I try to avoid Fleet at all costs; recently got the ship GTN so I don't have to go to Nar Shadda anymore either (unless I want to, obviously). I *hate* visiting Fleet. My ships are my homes, my staging areas, where I spend most of my non-questing time.

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On the chart is the small pink section space. If this is so (I suspect space might be lower) do your numbers support having a team that are just working on space missions.

 

After all its not like there is not so much content or requests from players being sorted quickly like new species or additional class story that a team can be devoted to something that few people would play.

 

Equally with so much time spent on the fleet is this metric taken into consideration by the development team to work on more content to get people off the fleet and play content. Or do the dev team want people on the fleet in vast numbers?

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Thank you for the interview. You put thought and care into answers. Good career advice to young ones, as well.

 

And special thanks for sharing that chart! More data <redacted, starts with p>, please!

Edited by MariaD
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I find it interesting that more time is spent on fleet or in Ops, FP's, and WZ. (and not much on planetary time - i.e. time spent "in the story" of the War between the Sith and the Republic) - that means there are a lot of lvl 50's that are running around without something to do - or they are running the FP's, etc. over and over for a few commendations and getting bored like me. How many times do we have to keep running the same Ops, etc. before we just quit from bordom. The game is about the storyline and without expanding and changing the storyline it just gets too boring. So I run an ops 4 or 5 times just to get some minor upgrades and to beat the op? --- after that there is no more challenge or purpose! And you think I'm going to create more than 2 or 3 characters just to run them through the same missions over and over again? All the new level 50 ops, etc., are nothing more than bait to keep the die-hards hanging on for another month or two, another piece of gear so they can brag to their friends, etc..

 

SWTOR is a cool game (and story) for level 1 - 50 ------- then it completely fails!

 

Suggestion:

There should be a different "multi-path" story for each advance class - that way everyone will stay interested in the story and have multiple possiblities for their characters even if they play the same character type multiple times - = endless hours of play, no bordom, more players, and more money for your company... A game's success depends on a good story and once you reach lvl 50 in SWTOR there is no more story....

Edited by RalphYauger
incorrect info
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I find it interesting that more time is spent on fleet or in Ops, FP's, and WZ. (and not much on Lvl 1-50 planetary time - i.e. time spent "in the story" of the War between the Sith and the Republic) [snip]

 

Read again. The chart doesn't say anything about the time spent before level 50.

 

It seems that the interview was done a while ago. He said his brew would be ready for consumption around Thanksgiving. I assume he works at the Austin studio, which would mean Thanksgiving was Thursday, last week. It's fun to read these things though. I wish serendipity would work out as well for me as it's done him.

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I find it interesting that more time is spent on fleet or in Ops, FP's, and WZ. (and not much on Lvl 1-50 planetary time - i.e. time spent "in the story" of the War between the Sith and the Republic) - that means there are a lot of lvl 50's that are running around without something to do - or they are running the FP's, etc. over and over for a few commendations and getting bored like me. .

 

You need to read the bit above the graph again. That chart was for level 50s only, and showed no data for planetary time spent levelling. The percentage of game time spent on planets that was shown in the graph was for time spent by 50s doing dailies/gathering/wandering aimlessly, and not for anyone levelling a new char.

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I just want to mention I really enjoyed reading your article Mr. Crow! As a high school student about to enter college, I get excited when I read about using statistics, analyzation, and careers. Getting involved with SWTOR as both work and play is basically my dream job...your so lucky!
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You need to read the bit above the graph again. That chart was for level 50s only, and showed no data for planetary time spent levelling. The percentage of game time spent on planets that was shown in the graph was for time spent by 50s doing dailies/gathering/wandering aimlessly, and not for anyone levelling a new char.

 

Sorry for the mistake - i updated it. It really makes no difference - if you visit the planets you'll see the numbers are still low. The merit of my arguement still stands - once you reach 50 = boring. More variety/possiblities in the various storylines makes the game interesting and repeatable.

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