Welcome to the first official Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ (TOR) BioWare Blog. This section will be used by various team members from Star Wars: The Old Republic team to tell you a little bit about themselves; some of their tasks and responsibilities on TOR, what they like to do in their free time, and other interests. Everyone here plays a vital role to the development of the game and we want to give you the opportunity to get to know everyone better.

In this first installment, I'm going to tell you a little bit about some of the people you'll be interacting within the TOR community.

First we have Robert ‘Jedi Rob’ Chestney who is a Senior Writer and has been with BioWare since early 2006. Before moving over to the Community Team, Rob worked on the Design team, developing the setting and backstory for the game as well as the storyline for one of the character classes. Prior to BioWare, Rob worked as a Producer and Writer at CNN where he worked on many projects including an Emmy Award winning newscast.

Next we have Amy Crider, a recent addition to the BioWare family and the Community Team. Amy has worked in the game development industry for over five years in many capacities; from creating In-Game Events to Customer Service and then to Community Management.

And finally, there is me. I’ve been working in the game development industry now for over eight years and prior to that, I was in the U.S. Marine Corps (Semper Fi!). I started off in community management, did double duty in community and game system design for a few years, and now I’m back fully into community management. Back at home.

As with everyone else here, I am a huge Star Wars fan. Working on this game with LucasArts, working at BioWare, and being able to work alongside such a talented and experienced development team… it’s definitely a dream come true.

We at BioWare have four core values that help shape our company and products: Quality in our Workplace, Quality in our Products, Entrepreneurship, and a Commitment to doing it all in a context of Humility and Integrity. I bring this up because I know all of you have numerous questions about the project, many of which we cannot answer at this time. The reason for this is simple. We only want to give you, our fans, fair and accurate information. We don’t want to tell you how we want something to work; we want to tell you how something does work. So, until a system is working as intended or a feature is fully implemented, we will rarely discuss it.

If you have any questions or feedback for us, feel free to post it in the forums. This is an area for the community as a whole to interact and collaborate.

May the Force be with you…

Sean