Bear in mind that what I am about to post is pure speculation. What if the overall purpose behind the development of KotFEET was the team seeking to curry favor with Big BW (the "main" studio up north in Edmonton) by going in a conventional RPG direction? Given how much of a developmental departure these expacs were from what had come before, this could be a correct interpretation.

The key to prevent "trouble" is to keep it to informed speculation versus baseless speculation. We can only go as far as the evidence takes us, and then possibly extend it a tad via logical inferences. Since we know nothing regarding who did what and when--and are very unlikely to know ever--there is no point in extending what I wrote further. Mainly wrote that to try and tamp down the gloom-and-doom with a reasonable overview of what we don't know and will likely never know. I know what you had listed was related to fishing with the word "bass" in the title. I had initially assumed that you were referencing fishing games--perhaps even a fishing MMO (yes, this idea struck me as stupid and I quickly dismissed it)--but a quick web search told me that those are fishing boats, since I found it odd you used the word "products" instead of "games." For myself, I'm nearly done with a prospective history journal article that hopefully I'll be getting off before the Fourth of July or on the 5th. Then it will be time to work on writing three Statements of Purposes for the history PhD programs I'll be applying to for admission in Dec. and Jan, taking the GRE and improving my German--and still squeezing in some time for gaming and hanging with pals. I believe it is safe to operate under the assumption that we will have some idea of how things are going to shape up by June of next year. About a year's time strikes me as more than fair to gauge if our beloved game's best days are still ahead of us after all. Let's all keep everything that can cross crossed that this hope becomes reality. Wait and see--and hope--is mostly all we can do in addition to continuing to play TOR.

I see our dear LadyAdmiral tried every conceivable troubleshooting avenue under the sun from a player perspective. My hat's off to her because I don't/wouldn't have the patience for that. There is a varied player base that play for different reasons. I suspect that it is likely impossible to adequately satisfy all the factions with sufficient attention. I play for story and PVP and I'd characterize myself as a semi-casual PVPer. I only ever ran the vanilla ops, only ran KP all the way through at least 10x, the other ones, I only earned achievements for the first two bosses. This was in 2013, and I don't remember if I was running them because I genuinely wanted to or because of some event. Also, from the team side, we don't know anything about the corporate culture they were operating in at BW. We know revenue was being diverted to other BW projects and that the SWTOR team members were shifted to work on other projects as BW felt necessary. From Chris' tweets, it could be fair to say that SWTOR was something BW didn't entirely understand. We also don't know just how involved Lucasfilm is as well. We also don't know how many levels of management there were above Keith. We don't know how much BW supervised the development of SWTOR. Did Keith's roadmap posts stop because the team decided to stop them internally, or did BW decide they were to cease? Devoid of genuine insights and knowledge of the internal workings of BW as a whole, we can only speculate. Did the EP of SWTOR ever have one-on-one meetings with top studio executives post-launch to discuss the game's state, future plans, and budgets? Or are such meetings done at a lower level? Then there are James Ohlen's comments from 2 years ago when he left that BW had become "too corporate." That suggests to me that there were too many meetings taking place and too many decisions needed to be discussed in meetings. Meetings--and needing to get buy-in from several people--tends to slow down coming to any decision.

I still think the best solution is to limit it to guild challenges only. I have no idea how often that feature is used, but limiting PVP premades to that feature could be healthy for guilds.

I just want to also lend my support to petitioning that something be done about premades in PVP. Either limit them to 2 people or limit them to guild challenges only. Also, second OlBuzzard with the idea of being able to repeat prior content with a difficulty boost--and it MUST remove level sync. Imagine going at it with a level 80 Thanaton, Zash, Baras, Rakton, etc. Time will reveal what kind of steward Broadsword will be for SWTOR. In the mean time, let us remain hopeful that this is the start of a new beginning unless future experience reveals that pessimism is warranted.

Remember that we don't know when these talks started. They could well have started sometime in the 4th Q of last year since there would be a lot to hammer out in an MOU. Lucasfilm likely also had some input into the decision as well.

I am heartened the statement says "most of the team" will be making the move and that BW is going to provide assistance associated with any possible "culture shock." I imagine Keith and Eric--at the very least--are currently having numerous meetings with Broadsword to ensure this transition is as seamless as possible for the Team--and us.

Yes, a story for non-Force and Force users would have been the most appropriate way to go for maintaining story cohesiveness and player immersion. Valkorian shouldn't have even bothered to notice what the non-Force using classes are doing largely because the actions of the Force-using characters were definitely leaving a mark on galactic history. I feel that a majority of KotFE could have remained exactly the same for all classes, but there would be a difference for chapters 10-12: Here there would be a bit of a fork between Force-users and tech classes. A choice would be provided for Chapter 10: either Anarchy in Paradise or Disavowed could be run. Chapters 11 and 12 would be devoted to Visions in the Dark and some sort of prelude to it for Force-users only. Tech classes would have had some sort of separate training missions to run for their Chapters 11 and 12. There would have to be other changes made, since Arkan, Vaylin, Senya, and Valk would only be foes for the Force-users.

Foreign companies operating in China require a Chinese partner that would then have full access to the foreign firm's IP. AWS--provided their will be sufficient redundancy provided for SWTOR--will likely be a boon for the game. Given that the test server was for APAC, I think we can assume that Amazon has a server farm in Australia or New Zealand. This could provide the game with a greater global reach. Being a military historian, I have no idea of the technical side of things, but the logistics of keeping some of these data facilities stocked with hard drives, servers, networking equipment, etc. must be impressive.

The number of additional items added to the CM regularly was likely more driven by EA and/or BW to get more revenue. For all we know BW may have been promised x% of CM revenue would be funneled back to them by EA. Deprecated armor sets, decos, weapons, etc. could be offered as rewards for completing FPs and Ops. Additionally, they could also be sold on vendors for a lot of credits a piece to aid with clamping down on the credit supply. There are also armors in the game that could be made available in the game--for instance, Vitiate's armor.

Passion and optimism are two positive attributes to see on display. Seems the process is farther along than I had assumed.

We don't even know how in the loop Keith is on the finer details of the move that are likely above his pay grade. Nor do we know how far along negotiations are. Have draft contracts been drawn up yet? How many levels of review do they have to go through? Are the parties just BioWare and Broadsword or is EA also a party to the negotiations? Judging from what Keith has told us, all three may be involved. That probably means three different teams of lawyers need to look things over and sign off on it--even through BW and Broadsword are both EA subsidiaries. EA obviously cannot dictate how this move is going to go; if they could, it makes no sense for this to have hit the news.

We are likely never going to learn about all the internal goings on behind the curtain with this game re: budgets, etc. except vague statements. Companies--like governments--do not like to be embarrassed or to apologize. Reading an article in the latest Journal of Military History (April 2023), I was rather shocked to learn that the British and French still have not fully released all of their records from World War II. There are still some matters of a sensitive nature that they wish to keep secret. Bureaucracies horde information and relish in secrecy and desire to protect their reputations from imagine or actual harm (a bureaucractic ego, if you will). The SWTOR team is a small one that is part of a bigger one--BW--that is a cog in an even bigger one--EA. So there we have three levels of bureaucracy, each one likely with its own particular culture. At least with communication on this issue of moving studios, Keith's communication appears to be coming as quickly as possible, since we have to keep in mind that the whole team could be as anxious as we are about this situation.

It would be wonderful if class stories could return. However, all of us would need to bear in mind that it wouldn't be possible to throw together a new chapter's worth of class quests quickly, since it means coming up with 8 chapters of content as we all know. I do think the story is at a good point for such a thing to possibly happen. A compromise that could be more workable would include doing 4 stories: dividing by faction and Force-sensitivity. This Mando and Malgus business could be seen as an interlude from the war as Empire and Republic work to extinguish a potential mutual thorn in our sides: the Mandalorians, a people whose only loyalty is to themselves and battle. An enduring alliance is impossible with such a culture. With the war proper, we have mainly been focusing our efforts on shoring up our faction's logistical tail. This offers a fine point at which to branch out again and permit our characters to get back to their roots. For example: the smuggler could join the hunt for an Imperial privateer who has been conducting strikes along a major supply line. For Agents, it could turn out that this privateer is actually Cypher 9 operating under a cover identity (could always use the Red Blade as a nice callback). The Trooper could be participating in an assault on an imperial stronghold with a layered defense that will take time to crack. The BH could have some bounties to collect of senators, Pub military, industrialists, etc. The SW could be tasked with leading the defense of the installation the Trooper has been tasked with attacking or defending/attacking something else. The SI could be on the hunt for an artifact rumored to hold immense power--could even be some old trinket of the former Emperor. The JK could be in hot pursuit of the SI.

Thanks for the Bioware historical refresher. I had forgotten about the clusters of Andromeda and Anthem, and how the Kotaku article (which I went back to reread) makes it clear that the game languished in pre-production hell because there was no single final decision-maker on the project until very late in the development cycle. Now I can vividly recall the lifeless, dead eyes in Andromeda and the quickly repetitive play of Anthem--also, its lack of a captivating story or, honestly, much of a story to begin with. Then there was Galactic Command with the launch of TOR's 5.0 update in Dec 2016. Before this update went live, I didn't read patch notes or look at the forums much. I was in my first grad school class at the time--historiography--and had gotten into my head that Galactic Command was going to be a new mini-game that was going to introduce some military strategy into the game: with being able to move fleets and armies around the galactic map to defend against Eternal Empire attacks. I was incredibly disappointed to log into early access to see it was just to score points and with X points you get an RNG loot box. Hopefully EA will continue to provide sufficient resources, and Broad Sword is interested in investing in the game. Hopefully, the acquisition of TOR for them is part of a long term strategy.