If you could pull your fanboy head out of a deep, dark, smelly place you'd know that most of us complaining are doing so because we love the game and want to enjoy it and see it thrive. We're just disappointed as hell with what the development team is doing with it. I've been critical of SWTOR over the years but in the months leading up to FE and for the first few weeks was singing its praises, even if I still had some gripes. I want to be able to feel good about subscribing to the game, knowing that my money is going to a team of devs who care about their players (both paying and not) and treat them with respect. I don't feel that way at all right now, so that's what I'm continuing to voice my complaints. But you can live in your fanboy fantasy world where you either blindly love the game or you're a hater that just wants to see it closed down.

I have. Multiple times throughout the thread. If you haven't bothered to read it that's your problem.

I'll quote this as well in the hopes that someone on the community team reads it. I slightly disagree about story not being content (it accompany's and compliments it), but it's core is abso-freaking-lutely correct.

Then a large par of the community teams job would be removed and there would be little point to them. Again, the core issue is years of neglect of the community and a lack of steady communication. It's like having a car that you drive but don't bother to maintain at all for years. No fluid level checks/fluid changes, no checking on tire pressure or even if they're flat, never bringing it into the shop for a onceover to make sure that the mechanical parts are all in working order and not in need of adjustments/replacements. And your car runs like **** for years but you ignore it. Then once day you change the oil and expect everything to be fixed. No, that won't do much. That's a step towards getting your car back in order, just as the community team needs to take steps towards rebuilding this community into something that's now awful. Can't speak to that game personally, but I'm not saying dishing pure information and overloading folks (though that's a different situation since that's a still in-development game that's unreleased, while SWTOR has been out for almost half a decade now). I'm talking about engaging with the community in general. Sometimes that means posting information that's new. Sometimes that means clarifying something for someone that was confused or incorrect. Sometimes that means acknowledging a bug or community complaint so that they know you're there and reading the forums. Sometimes it's delivering unpopular news like "Sorry guys, no new warzones planned at the moment." There's more to community engagement than just being an information spigot. Again, it's not all about information. It's about communication and engagement.

Yup. I mean, in-game it's still pretty awful, but it's a far sight better than it was years ago. Riot has spent a ton of time and money on working to keep their community engaged and to weed out negative behaviors (not criticism, but stuff like trolling/harassment etc.) and reinforce positive behaviors (constructive feedback, positive posting etc.) I don't expect SWTOR to do the same, because Riot has spent a ridiculous amount of money on this longterm project. But I'd expect some modicum of effort be made, and right now it doesn't seem like the community team is doing much of anything : /

No, the lack of community building engagement for years is what's led to the current state of the community. The current uproar is because of...wait for it...poor communication! Folks don't know what's coming down the pipeline in terms of non-story content. People are still confused/upset about the companion buff/nerf/buff and how that came to pass. Folks felt like BioWare dramatically overstated how major the announcement would be on today's livestream. Folks are upset about having to wait 2 more months for new content. And because there's little info on all of this and because folks don't seem to have much trust/faith that the community team will work to address these concerns, you're seeing all the complaints now. Doesn't help that there's little in the way of moderation to cut down on duplicate threads and centralize feedback about topics into one/a few threads to keep it moderately readable. Again, showing up on a livestream isn't going to magically fix years of neglect. It's going to take a lot of community and trust building to do that.

Erm... 1. That's still their job. Just because there are a lot of angry/upset folks doesn't mean they get to hide in their cubicles and not interact with the community. If I got to avoid interacting with my upset/angry clients at work I'd have infinitely less stress, but I'd be awful at my job. 2. Their absolute lack of community building/engagement/interaction is the very reason why the forums are so awful. They've done nothing to guide the community and work to make it into a more positive bunch of folks who can deliver meaningful feedback and constructive criticism. This is what happens when you abandon the community and let its negativity feed on itself. Social media engagement is great, and is a part of what many community managers do (sometimes as part of their jobs and sometimes working with social media teams). But that's not where the core of the community is really going to be for the most part. Reddit might end up being that hub for many games, but the lack of control they have over there gives them minimal tools to really influence or community build. Again, Musco has been a completely inept community lead and no incarnation of the community team beneath him (there have been multiple attempts to "relaunch" the community team under his leadership IIRC) has ever lead to anything meaningful.

The community team is responsible for delivering feedback to help the developers make meaningful and appropriate changes/additions based on said feedback. They're responsible for clearly communicating with their community - setting expectations for what's coming, clarifying when there is confusion, and working proactively to head off potential community troubles. I'm well aware of what a community team does, I've worked with a handful of them over the years. And to be honest, I have no clue what the SWTOR community team actually does, beyond react when the community is in an uproar over a terrible change or make grandiose statements of things to come that inevitably lead to disappointment from the fans who foolishly continue to believe them. The way you write it, they're blameless in all things. And trust me, they're not.

I was REALLY hoping for something truly exciting that would make me want to continue my sub. Was unsurprisingly (my body was ready for it) disappointed as all hell. I keep wanting to want to give you guys money and feel like I'm supporting a team that I feel is doing great work and values their community. But it seems you guys are determined to prove otherwise. Oh well, that's money to spend on other MMO's and games, I guess I'll mainly shelve SWTOR until all the chapters are finished and out. Very poor form. And seriously BioWare, your community team is awful. At this point, Trion has a better community team for their games than you do for SWTOR, even if that's purely because they picked up Linda Carlson.

The fact that the community team gets paid real money for the horrible job they do actually makes my head hurt.

>Implying that the community has ever been anything other than a collective circle of jerking My sides.

My main is a sage, so already rolled one : ) And maybe I jumped to the conclusion too quickly, but after years of seeing the SWTOR community, and even developers, refer to WoW in such a manner I defaulted to it.

First off, by pretending WoW is some giant evil like Voldemort you're being silly as hell. Brings me back to the guild summit stream where I spent the whole time cringing because everyone was apparently terrified to actually say "World of Warcraft". If you say it it's not going to appear out of nowhere and steal your firstborn. Second, WoW devs have admitted when they screwed up. As with BioWare, Blizzard doesn't do this often, but they have done it in the past. They've even changed their minds about it. Them putting valor points back into the game recently is an example of this (also because they need to find something to keep players busy for the next 10 months of no content). Because unlike WoW, I'm willing to bet BioWare saw a huge chunk of their subs abandoning the game and player concurrency/daily login numbers dropping like flies. They don't have the playerbase of WoW (even if SWTOR has 1M+ monthly active users [not subs, but users]) to be able to soak the initial hit from major reactions like that. I'm honestly struggling to think of a MMO developer that hasn't at one point or another apologized and/or reversed course on a policy or change that ended up being unpopular with its players. Trion, Blizzard, SOE/Daybreak, Turbine, NCsoft, and plenty of others have made mistakes like this and admitted to it and addressed the issues. It's great that BioWare is doing this, but they're not unique in doing so.

People didn't do heroics because they were unnecessary and because they required either finding a partner or far more effort than the rewards justified. At least compared to other activities that provided experience or items/credits. They're doing them now because you need to do them to grind out rep with the 4 alliances, which is pretty much all there is to do in the game until the next chapter launches. And I strongly disagree about them not wanting folks to faceroll through them at launch. Did they not bother doing ANY testing internally before launching to see how the 4.0 companions performed? Because it seems very obvious that the 4.0 companion power was very much intended, especially considering we had almost a full month of it without so much as a peep out of BioWare until a few days before the giant nerf stick came out.

Oh yeah, totally. I'm not saying this is unique to SWTOR : P

Battlefront isn't much of a threat. Totally different genre and it's largely pulling in console (PS4) players rather than PC players. Not to mention it's also an EA property and they're running cross promotions with it (SWTOR inserts in physical copies of Battlefront 3). Not to mention that Battlefront 3 lacks any kind of meaningful stickyness for long term engagement outside of a few DLC dumps. As to your second question, probably nothing. This has been a tradition since launch, so I can't imagine it changing any time soon : /

At this point, I'm not sure what they can do short of removing the whole community team and starting fresh with new faces. They've had people coming and going for years now (Musco remains the same though) and nothing has really changed. I feel like I remember a few times when they hired new folks and proclaimed how they'd start communicating more frequently and with more useful information, only to do so for a few weeks or a month before falling back into their old pattern of very sporadic communication. Really disappointing.

To be fair, that's the community teams fault, not Michael's. Michael likely got pulled in now because the community team needs an actually developer to poke his head in and calm folks down. If the devs aren't communicating, it's because the community team isn't telling them that they need to communicate/forcing them to do so. They're busy working on the game, it's the community team who should be the ones, you know, communicating. From what I've seen/read, Musco seems like a pretty cool guy. But the BioWare community team has a longstanding history of horrible and erratic communication with the community. If you want to get angry at someone for poor communication, they're the ones to direct criticism towards. Michael is just responsible (in part) for the complete lack of QA for FE content and the companion changes that lead to this whole debacle to begin with : )

It's like the, "We never expected players to hit level 50 within days/weeks of launch. We'd expected them to take 3-5 months!" from back at launch. If they aren't fully aware of the habits of their playerbase by now then that's entirely their fault. It should be painfully obvious by now that a good chunk of their players, especially the most vocal ones, are going to be grinding content like this when presented with it. Especially when it's the only way to really "progress" in the months between the end of chapter 9 and when chapter 10 will eventually launch.

I mean, he's got a point though. BioWare seems pretty routinely completely caught off guard at players doing...exactly what the game was designed to have them do. Admitting that you made a mistake doesn't free you from further criticism and/or questions as to how the mistake was made. This is hardly the first time BioWare has screwed up or made a very stupid mistake. If it was, there would be far more leniency from folks.

I see no mention of fixes to tank mitigation/threat in his post, though, and was under the assumption that the patch tomorrow is the 4.0.3 patch that they had planned but more of an emergency "Oh **** the community is flipping out we need to do something." patch.

When's that coming, though? Because for those of us who are a healing spec, having mostly useless tanking/dps companions makes doing open world content a major drag.

Yeah, I laughed in the office when I read that. Like, for reals, that's the mainstay of post chapter 9 content in the game right now. What were they expecting people to do instead of clearing that out every week to grind alliance rep? If they were caught that unawares, then there are far bigger problems of incompetence along the lines of "We expected people to take 3 months or more to hit level 50 at launch and were blown away people managed it in a matter of days/weeks!"

Thanks for the clarity. Some questions though. 1. How did the wildly overpowered companions make it out of internal/QA testing and to live in the state they were in? Did nobody catch on to their ludicrous power levels and flag it as a potential issue that could impact player behavior and gameplay? Did you not foresee players avoiding grouping for H2+ content and just soloing it with their overpowered companions. 2. When are tank companions getting their proper fix? IIRC they still are missing shielding/defensive stats and I know mine still has a hell of a time trying to hold threat off me from healing aggro alone. With what you've outlined, it feels like healing will be the "default" mode for companions since it will likely be far stronger/more useful than either tank or dps modes. And "emergent"? Really, that's hard for me to read you call players soloing H2+ content as "emergent", especially when you created the situation for it to happen (overpowered companions) and made the content itself a central part of the post-story gameplay. Sounds silly.

Many of the tacticals are wildly inconsistent in their tuning, with trash regularly being considerably harder than bosses and many bosses being extremely difficult without a tank/healer or properly geared max level players. I was excited about FP's turning into tacticals but after a week of frequent wipes I've all but given up on them.