That is absolutely your prerogative as a Bioware customer, Blackardin, and I hope the company also addresses your own concerns. If you would be prepared to share some of what inspires or troubles you about the current SWTOR offering and direction, I'd be interested to read it?

No problem, Tsillah; I will try to be clearer. I did not post my resumé, that would be excessive. I posted a couple of lines explaining who I was and what my experience is, so that Bioware (or other readers, given that this is posted in a public forum) have perspective on what I then write, which are I freely admit, my opinions as a player. Specifically, I wanted to clarify that: a) I am not a games developer and make no claim to being one, b) I have played a reasonable number of MMOs over a few years so am a customer with a reasonably broad perspective of market platforms, and c) I am a professional business analyst who looks at processes, business modelling and IT developments in another context. If I were reading a post, or a letter, or a business proposal from a complete stranger, I would expect to see something similar in the introduction. You are entirely free to feel otherwise, and I respect that you have different experiences and expectations to my own. Hope that helps. Alastair

Thanks for the comments, Spatology. I appreciate you have a different perspective to me; I’m happy to explain where I’m coming from so you can see where our opinions differ: “1 & 2. Crafting skills of diffrent varietys are useful, the rest of your point seems to stem from some underlying sentiment that pvp recruit/BM gear is just as good as pve gear and you dont need or have a desire to go after the other stuff. These 2 opinions are incorrect. The content is fun and also repeatable.” Whilst I agree that the Flashpoint/Mission content is fun, I don’t feel that the game incentivises repetition because the rewards are not worthwhile. What I mean by that is that the Flashpoint/Mission rewards are gear or gear tokens, but my own experience is that a full set of Recruit PvP gear for 200k credits is comparable in effectiveness PvE to Tionese gear; certainly good enough to allow access to storymode Operations and easy Columi gear. “3. There is nothing wrong with world pvp. Your issue is from being on an unpopulated server. Plenty of pvp goes down on fatman.” I’m glad that Fatman world PvP is thriving, but I don’t believe this is the case on many servers. I still believe that design change can make world PvP more appealing and accessible, allowing it to thrive elsewhere. Let’s all share in the fun! “4. Legacy has some useful stuff for messing around on world bosses etc. Something someone who was looking for fun outside of raiding/pvp i figured would have found. Id also prefer bioware not spend money adding "fluff" content...i dont need stuff to fill up my bags/toolbars.” I appreciate that vanity content doesn’t change gameplay, and I understand your priorities. Personally, I enjoy vanity content, but let’s assume most players are in a more middle ground between our two perspectives. The trouble with gear rewards is that once you have high itemisation in every slot, you’re done – further rewards offer you nothing. Vanity rewards are less restricted by the necessary game-balancing itemisation level caps, or by the number of gear slots on a character profile. Don’t get me wrong; there are other options – being able to buy PvP healing stims is a great idea in the current implementation for using up spare tokens, as they are disposable items. But whatever you add, we need more in terms of rewards than just a set of gear. “5. same issue as 3. please reffrence it.” Again, very happy for Bioware customers on Fatman, but there are other servers where this just isn’t the case. “6. there are currently vanity rewards for hardmode raids. also some vanity speeders. i appreciate Bioware keeping them semi rare. As a reward for dedicated players.” I’m not disparaging what’s there at present, but feel it’s a shame there aren’t more interesting items like these. Once you have the vanity speeder and the Hutt hat, what else is there? As a game offer, though, it just doesn’t make consistent sense as a business strategy. If the intention is to encourage people to play by grinding for rare vanity rewards in Operations, why restrict them to a weekly reset, when an experienced group could clear the whole of the current content in less than a day’s play? “7. imo, instead of world events, id appreciate the population issues/lfg tool/ranked pvp were dealt with.” Yes, I’d like to see all of the above. “8. this is a quality of life issue, fairly well remedied by a guild website outside of game. you are spoiled by wow kind person.” My point is that by encouraging people to use functionality outside the game, you make it easier for communities to migrate away. When your game is losing subscriptions, this seems like a strange area not to prioritise as a business. I’m also inferring that should the player population decrease, investment in the game will proportionally decrease as well, resulting in less development and less new content. For the investors and the player community, it’s a lose-lose scenario not to keep SWTOR players playing. “9. The diffrent teirs seem to be tuned fine for my guilds progress and preformance level. I'm not sure what you are talking about. Seems to be the issue from 1 and 2 again....” Again, I appreciate your experience differs from my own. My experience has been that the Recruit PvP gear bypasses Tionese gear, and therefore skips level 50 characters straight past the Flashpoint rewards and on to Operations. I’d add that this seems to be a recurring issue with the game, for example in terms of the standard Craftable Mods etc, which are completely superfluous on a similar basis. There doesn’t seem to be a coherent balancing of what’s made available that runs across the whole platform, to make sure all the routes to items and rewards are relevant and consistent. “10. 1.3 augment tables come out and you can wear whatever you want from the game. There are plenty of options and i think you would be in the minority saying that the armor doesnt look cool/appropriate.” Only if you pay to remove all the mods from your Rakata/Black Hole items and add to another set, and only if you discount the static pieces in which group all the Recruit PvP gear is included. I don’t disagree that more options are being added, and that’s great. I also understand that we all like different looks. I just think that when you’re driving a product proposition based on the Star Wars Intellectual Property, you should look to capitalise on the value of your USP, not resort to disparate styles that clash with the look and feel your customer base is (broadly) expecting. Hope that helps you to see where I’m coming from, and that you can accept that where our views differ that more than one perspective is at play. Alastair

This may help: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/open+letter

I think this is a very valid point. MMO companies seem to underestimate their player expectations for new content and game fixes... Bioware actually have a very small window of opportunity to shift the downward spiral of SWTOR, before they lose their audience; we're talking weeks not months. I worry that aren't treating the situation as crisis management, when commercially speaking they really should be. I worry that this may be a sign of the company's inexperience in the MMO market compared with static game releases - that the date of an MMOs release is when the tension and pace steps up, not down. Addressing issues strategically, in early redesign, and in customer communications is especially important to do immediately, given that for a game patch you may then have to allow 3 months for development time, testing and release before anything is actually delivered to your customers.

In the UK, we spell it "organisation". I appreciate it's different in the US.

Thanks to all for your posts, even those who disagree with me or my approach, as well as those whose support of my original post and the intentions behind it - your posts are greatly appreciated. Regardless of your personal preferences or intentions, or your personal opinions about me, it's good to see players really *caring* about the future of SWTOR. I'd like to add a few small things in response to some of your replies: 1. I don't make any claim to be writing new ideas. I am simply presenting my own feedback to Bioware. I feel as one of their customers, I have the right to do that on an open forum, and care about the game enough to want to present my hope for its future. I'm one tiny customer; there's not much I can do to influence the course of the game's future, other than add my own opinions to those of others, and say - this is what I think. I positively encourage you as Bioware customers to do the same - whatever your views - and know that you have given them the opportunity to address your concerns. What Bioware choose to do with our collective feedback is entirely up to them. 2. I felt I'd made it clear in my original post that I'm not a games designer. I didn't feel it was fair to level specific criticism at the game design without making that clear; my perspective is that of an informed player and customer, nothing more or less. I was hoping to avoid discussion along the lines of "by what right do you criticise this game" by briefly detailing my background, in which I've evidently not succeeded regardless. Please accept that this was not intended as any kind of personal judgement on the worthiness of other contributions, only as an introduction to my own. 3. More specifically, I agree with several posters here that server population is an issue for MMOs and is increasingly a problem for SWTOR. I was very interested to read that some felt this was the root of their own problems with the game. My reason for not addressing it in my own original post is that Bioware seem to have a strategy for managing this issue in terms of the free server migrations. However, I'm not convinced that consolidation will of itself resolve the other things I see as problems. This also seems to me to be a fix of the symptoms of a game which is losing population, rather than addressing the root cause. So, I'm interested to know what others think this will do to resolve the design problems in the game?

At the risk of duplicating my post, am re-posting this in Suggestions in case this is more appropriate than General Discussion: I'm not a games designer. I've been a business analyst for over 10 years, and specialise in IT developments, looking at how processes work and deliver for customers and users. I've played MMOs since 2005, organising Guilds and gaming communities for some of that time, and witnessed games transform as I played them to mixed critical reception. In all, I believe I have a reasonable perspective on what makes an MMO work for its players, coupled with realistic expectations around the lead time involved in designing and delivering platform change. But I'm not a games designer. I'm a player. If SWTOR doesn't adapt, my opinion as a player is that it will spiral to a smaller and smaller player base and then die. Commercially, that may be acceptable to Bioware, but it seems like a missed opportunity to me. SWTOR could relatively easily adapt and maintain an MMO market share, and continue to provide revenue and a fun gaming experience. There are a couple of fundamental mistakes in the game design at present: 1. Endgame content fun is limited to Battleground PvP and Operations. 2. Scaling the PvP Gear has made PvE content redundant. With less dirct impact, but significant because the design has failed to deliver are the rest of my "top ten": 3. World PvP doesn't work at all 4. The Legacy system fails to offer incentives to play, it's just a money sink 5. Queue times for Battleground PvP content are artificially longer than necessary 6. Token based rewards are all itemised gear, lacking in vanity items which retain value beyond item scaling 7. The experiment with a world event in the Rakghoul Plague had no follow up 8. SWTOR lacks community management tools, encouraging players to use external tools and making it easier for them to migrate to other games 9. Change management between reward systems has been poor and demoralised players 10. Gear frequently fails to match the Star Wars tone If the above aren't clearly being addressed, I expect I'll move on to the next MMO... which would be a shame, because SWTOR has several saving graces which make it a game worth saving, if you can. I hear nothing but praise for the quality and pacing of Operations, the quality and balance of the PvP Battlegrounds, the class skills and talent trees, the great visual design of the game worlds, and the excellent story-driven interface and cut-scenes. So, Bioware, can you maintain that high quality whilst finding someone with the game design skills to deal with the problem areas which undermine them? Not liking to present problems without some ideas about a solution, here are some thoughts: 1. Endgame content fun is limited to Battleground PvP and Operations: By limiting rewards to scaling gear with itemisation levels, you swiftly make the game content outside that redundant. This includes all the work the teams have done on Crafting Skills, Quests and Daily Quests, Space Battles and Flashpoints. They just don't provide any kind of useful rewards. Furthermore, the design makes them a grind for money and tokens (and possibly Social level), not an enjoyable experience you would choose to do for the fun or challenge or reward. The rewards need urgent review as a short term fix. Future content needs to be made to be fun to play and repeat, and offer an interesting and lasting choice of rewards. 2. Releasing the new cash-purchased level 50 PvP Gear was fine for balancing the PvP arena, but immediately rendered Tionese and lower itemisation gear redundant. For 200k you could immediately be Operation-ready and able to take on someone in full Tionese. Why have you not upped the PvE rewards to match the scaling in the PvP gear? Why would anyone now do a Flashpoint more than once, when the rewards are valueless? The PvE rewards need to scale at the same rate. 3. World PvP is problematic for every game you see it in. The main issues are a lack of opponents, unbalanced teams or uninspiring rewards. So, offer some decent rewards only available through World PvP for one. Then design the area to make it easy for people to get to from their main (ie: Fleet) location so it's quick to load. Design a big area with multiple objectives, so a small mobile group can still have successes, or give them a stats boost if necessary. Then offer a range of fun Daily Mission Quests which are in the PvP area but not PvP dependent to bring people back to the area actively on a regular basis. A fun PvP scenario and a few in-game graphic effects would be a bonus. 4. The Legacy system fails to offer incentives to play, it's just a money sink: This seems to have missed the point in implementation, and really needs a redesign. Legacy level itself should reward players who have kept on playing any and all content, as an incentive to keep playing. Crazy costs just make it painfully unappealing; do you really want to blow 2 million credits on a spurious reward, or keep that banked for Operations costs? As a money sink, it is equally daft; at best a short term fix to a bloated economy amongst a small elite of obsessive players - why make everything a static cost rather than offer recurring items of limited duration? Surely the economy will shrink once, then bloat again in the same way? Legacy should be designed to make it easier to play up alts, and reward people for doing so, encouraging people to enjoy the content without the more restrictive experience of their first levelling. And where are the fun vanity rewards? A few emotes? What about pets, roleplay gear, titles, ship cosmetics, etc? It's a missed opportunity to incentivise players to stay that just needs a strategic rethink about what it's trying to achieve. 5. Queue times for Battleground PvP content are artificially longer than necessary: Implement a cross-server queueing system for PvP Battlegrounds and for Flashpoints, to make it a faster experience for the players. This seems like a massive oversight, and is not market competitive with the current same-server only system. 6. Token based rewards are all itemised gear, lacking in vanity items which retain value beyond item scaling: More rewards should be fun, interesting, utility items, or pure vanity items (especially items with limited charges to encourage players to purchase again and again). Just offering itemised gear for the tokens you collect in PvE or PvP creates a natural cap on how long they have any value, and is entirely unnecessary. 7. The experiment with a world event in the Rakghoul Plague had no follow up: This came and went like a ball of confusion. It was interesting, but over in a flash, leaving in its wake a load of confused players who didn't see any ongoing references to what has happened, and were left holding stacks of tokens/inventory items that they couldn't spend, but presumably need to hang onto? This needed to blend more seamlessly into the ongoing world, ideally leading on into the next event, and leave behind a legacy of fixed vendors/suppliers/quests to allow players to complete/spend their tokens and get closure to their story. 8. SWTOR lacks community management tools, encouraging players to use external tools and making it easier for them to migrate to other games: If you don't have an event calendar and other guild management tools easy to use, players are forced to use external options - their own Forums, Facebook, Steam etc. This makes it a lot easier for your SWTOR Guild communities to move away from the game. As an individual player, that may not be a bad thing, but looking at the future of the SWTOR community as a whole, it's not a bright outlook. You should have a development team working on making the Guild and Community experience in SWTOR as easy and supported as possible. It's those communities which will remain loyal during the gaps in content, and will encourage more casual players to return, whilst keeping your servers alive for new players. In many ways, Guild communities act as in-game advisors and moderators, engaging with, managing and supporting less experienced players on Bioware's behalf. You need to be engaging with them and making them happy to be here. 9. Change management between reward systems has been poor and demoralised players: A lot of the issues with SWTOR suggest a lack of thorough impact assessment when changes are put into the game. Someone needs to have a clear strategic overview of what the design teams are doing, and be capable of gap analysis - asking the questions like what happens to the PvE content if we implement this new PvP itemised gear? Then (and this is often the hard bit) someone needs to listen to them, and do something about the gaps, preferably before the new content is released. Get a good Change Manager. 10. Gear frequently fails to match the Star Wars tone: We don't play Star Wars to look like transformers, nor to have oversized WoW shoulderpads inflicted upon us. Realistic costumes and some normal looking clothes and armours would be better. I appreciate it's arrogant and assuming for me to offer recommendations on how to run your game. You may well have good reasons for some of the above, and be confident you have others in hand. You may disagree with my perspective, that's fine too. But please listen and consider - I know I am far from being alone in my concerns, and I'd like these issues addressed so that SWTOR can become the success it deserves to be. Regards, Alastair

Privilege, no. Insight, yes. If I take my car to a garage to be fixed, I'd prefer the mechanic to have worked on a few other cars beforehand, to give them some experience and perspective. However, I apologise if I've irritated you. I'm more familiar with writing formal business cases, where establishing credentials is important before presenting a case, than posting on forums. I accept that may well be overly formal or extremely passe.

I'm not a games designer. I've been a business analyst for over 10 years, and specialise in IT developments, looking at how processes work and deliver for customers and users. I've played MMOs since 2005, organising Guilds and gaming communities for some of that time, and witnessed games transform as I played them to mixed critical reception. In all, I believe I have a reasonable perspective on what makes an MMO work for its players, coupled with realistic expectations around the lead time involved in designing and delivering platform change. But I'm not a games designer. I'm a player. If SWTOR doesn't adapt, my opinion as a player is that it will spiral to a smaller and smaller player base and then die. Commercially, that may be acceptable to Bioware, but it seems like a missed opportunity to me. SWTOR could relatively easily adapt and maintain an MMO market share, and continue to provide revenue and a fun gaming experience. There are a couple of fundamental mistakes in the game design at present: 1. Endgame content fun is limited to Battleground PvP and Operations. 2. Scaling the PvP Gear has made PvE content redundant. With less dirct impact, but significant because the design has failed to deliver are the rest of my "top ten": 3. World PvP doesn't work at all 4. The Legacy system fails to offer incentives to play, it's just a money sink 5. Queue times for Battleground PvP content are artificially longer than necessary 6. Token based rewards are all itemised gear, lacking in vanity items which retain value beyond item scaling 7. The experiment with a world event in the Rakghoul Plague had no follow up 8. SWTOR lacks community management tools, encouraging players to use external tools and making it easier for them to migrate to other games 9. Change management between reward systems has been poor and demoralised players 10. Gear frequently fails to match the Star Wars tone If the above aren't clearly being addressed, I expect I'll move on to the next MMO... which would be a shame, because SWTOR has several saving graces which make it a game worth saving, if you can. I hear nothing but praise for the quality and pacing of Operations, the quality and balance of the PvP Battlegrounds, the class skills and talent trees, the great visual design of the game worlds, and the excellent story-driven interface and cut-scenes. So, Bioware, can you maintain that high quality whilst finding someone with the game design skills to deal with the problem areas which undermine them? Not liking to present problems without some ideas about a solution, here are some thoughts: 1. Endgame content fun is limited to Battleground PvP and Operations: By limiting rewards to scaling gear with itemisation levels, you swiftly make the game content outside that redundant. This includes all the work the teams have done on Crafting Skills, Quests and Daily Quests, Space Battles and Flashpoints. They just don't provide any kind of useful rewards. Furthermore, the design makes them a grind for money and tokens (and possibly Social level), not an enjoyable experience you would choose to do for the fun or challenge or reward. The rewards need urgent review as a short term fix. Future content needs to be made to be fun to play and repeat, and offer an interesting and lasting choice of rewards. 2. Releasing the new cash-purchased level 50 PvP Gear was fine for balancing the PvP arena, but immediately rendered Tionese and lower itemisation gear redundant. For 200k you could immediately be Operation-ready and able to take on someone in full Tionese. Why have you not upped the PvE rewards to match the scaling in the PvP gear? Why would anyone now do a Flashpoint more than once, when the rewards are valueless? The PvE rewards need to scale at the same rate. 3. World PvP is problematic for every game you see it in. The main issues are a lack of opponents, unbalanced teams or uninspiring rewards. So, offer some decent rewards only available through World PvP for one. Then design the area to make it easy for people to get to from their main (ie: Fleet) location so it's quick to load. Design a big area with multiple objectives, so a small mobile group can still have successes, or give them a stats boost if necessary. Then offer a range of fun Daily Mission Quests which are in the PvP area but not PvP dependent to bring people back to the area actively on a regular basis. A fun PvP scenario and a few in-game graphic effects would be a bonus. 4. The Legacy system fails to offer incentives to play, it's just a money sink: This seems to have missed the point in implementation, and really needs a redesign. Legacy level itself should reward players who have kept on playing any and all content, as an incentive to keep playing. Crazy costs just make it painfully unappealing; do you really want to blow 2 million credits on a spurious reward, or keep that banked for Operations costs? As a money sink, it is equally daft; at best a short term fix to a bloated economy amongst a small elite of obsessive players - why make everything a static cost rather than offer recurring items of limited duration? Surely the economy will shrink once, then bloat again in the same way? Legacy should be designed to make it easier to play up alts, and reward people for doing so, encouraging people to enjoy the content without the more restrictive experience of their first levelling. And where are the fun vanity rewards? A few emotes? What about pets, roleplay gear, titles, ship cosmetics, etc? It's a missed opportunity to incentivise players to stay that just needs a strategic rethink about what it's trying to achieve. 5. Queue times for Battleground PvP content are artificially longer than necessary: Implement a cross-server queueing system for PvP Battlegrounds and for Flashpoints, to make it a faster experience for the players. This seems like a massive oversight, and is not market competitive with the current same-server only system. 6. Token based rewards are all itemised gear, lacking in vanity items which retain value beyond item scaling: More rewards should be fun, interesting, utility items, or pure vanity items (especially items with limited charges to encourage players to purchase again and again). Just offering itemised gear for the tokens you collect in PvE or PvP creates a natural cap on how long they have any value, and is entirely unnecessary. 7. The experiment with a world event in the Rakghoul Plague had no follow up: This came and went like a ball of confusion. It was interesting, but over in a flash, leaving in its wake a load of confused players who didn't see any ongoing references to what has happened, and were left holding stacks of tokens/inventory items that they couldn't spend, but presumably need to hang onto? This needed to blend more seamlessly into the ongoing world, ideally leading on into the next event, and leave behind a legacy of fixed vendors/suppliers/quests to allow players to complete/spend their tokens and get closure to their story. 8. SWTOR lacks community management tools, encouraging players to use external tools and making it easier for them to migrate to other games: If you don't have an event calendar and other guild management tools easy to use, players are forced to use external options - their own Forums, Facebook, Steam etc. This makes it a lot easier for your SWTOR Guild communities to move away from the game. As an individual player, that may not be a bad thing, but looking at the future of the SWTOR community as a whole, it's not a bright outlook. You should have a development team working on making the Guild and Community experience in SWTOR as easy and supported as possible. It's those communities which will remain loyal during the gaps in content, and will encourage more casual players to return, whilst keeping your servers alive for new players. In many ways, Guild communities act as in-game advisors and moderators, engaging with, managing and supporting less experienced players on Bioware's behalf. You need to be engaging with them and making them happy to be here. 9. Change management between reward systems has been poor and demoralised players: A lot of the issues with SWTOR suggest a lack of thorough impact assessment when changes are put into the game. Someone needs to have a clear strategic overview of what the design teams are doing, and be capable of gap analysis - asking the questions like what happens to the PvE content if we implement this new PvP itemised gear? Then (and this is often the hard bit) someone needs to listen to them, and do something about the gaps, preferably before the new content is released. Get a good Change Manager. 10. Gear frequently fails to match the Star Wars tone: We don't play Star Wars to look like transformers, nor to have oversized WoW shoulderpads inflicted upon us. Realistic costumes and some normal looking clothes and armours would be better. I appreciate it's possibly arrogant and assuming for me to offer recommendations on how to run your game as someone outside your company. You may well have good reasons for some of the above concerns, and be confident you have others in hand. You may disagree with my perspective, that's fine too. But please listen and consider - I know I am far from being alone in my concerns, and I'd like these issues addressed so that SWTOR can become the success it deserves to be. Regards, Alastair