Your analogy made me laugh out loud, thanks

If you have not noticed, they have level restrictions in place for quests. ie: specific NPC's will not even generate a conversation if you do not meet the required level to converse. if playerLevel (!is >=) then doConverse; this allowQuest activation player;

Well said, Infact the last few weeks of Beta I made a very verbose and detailed thread RE: poor textures. Not a single response came from Bioware then, because they knew.

Wrong, You missed 2 MMO's that have accomplished this..... World War II Online Fallen Earth

I would also like to note from: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=33477

This is where Bioware should refund specific customers any/all associated costs they have taken-on in order to create/provide server forums. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=173672 Bioware failed at launch to provide server forums, then they expected customers to pay for their own server forums. Now they are turning back and trying to save face on a terrible decision. All of you who have paid out-of-pocket expenses to create server forums should demand a refund (expense reimbursement).

Go to the thread I linked, read their responses. It's all clearly laid out and organanized on there. It's not a matter of "what" they'll moderate, it's a matter of them stating they "cannot" provide the service and therefore "do not" want to give it to us.

Wrong, http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=3500 They said it's because they don't have the manpower to moderate all the forums. That boils down to piss poor management and business development. Here is why this will not work You are asking and expecting people to do something for YOU. This is a function that Bioware should do for US. Why should we, the customers, be further burdened with keeping your forums organized? Did you know that vBulletin had this wonderful feature called "THREAD PREFIX"? Guess what that does? It forces users in vBulletin to SELECT a custom defined field which is displayed on the thread title, and it can be toggled so that users cannot complete a thread creation until they have selected a prefix. So, again, you are making it harder on your customers by: a) Lack of provided organization b) Lack of expertise in vBulletin c) Lack of mitigated burdens for customers to deal with Please, for the sake of the community, educate your fellow employees. Put a stop to this nonsense. A Community Manager can make or break a game, I would know

No per: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=3500 Allison, I understand the difficulties and challenges of your position, however I urge you to refrain from ignoring demands from your customers. No one mentioned, asked, or even recommended SERVER GROUP FORUMS. The demand was simple as per ( http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=3500 ), give your customers SERVER SPECIFIC FORUMS. Meaning, individual forums for servers, NOT group forums. This is quite simply insulting and I am more then embarrassed for Bioware as a whole this early on in the MMO game. Bioware had a shot at ranking #1 and cornering the market. That shot is slowly fading. EVERYONE came to this game with hopes an dreams after being spood fed (life is great on this side of the fence). The path you are headed down right now is the same path previous companies such as SOE chose to take which ultimately lead to the demise of the product (death of the game). Do not continue this rampant disregard for your customers best interest. You have more then proven that you are more worried about the product then the consumers. Cease and deisist now before it's too late to mitigate and reverse the damage. It would behoove you to gather your employees together, hold a meeting and let each and every one of them read the contents within ( http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=3500 ). Whoever is making use of the company whiteboard and "el-marko's", tell them to stop, sit down and pay attention. This is not the time, nor place, to be debating what each employee thinks is better for the customers. The customers have spoken. Pay very close attention to the demands outlined in ( http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=3500 ). It really is quite simple. Infact, if you read through several of the pages you'll find my post where I even did the leg work for you and told you the simple steps of creating a vBulletin forum section (just how easy it is to give US what we want). I would like to thank you for your time in this matter and value your input. I do, once again, highly recommend you refrain from any further disregard of customer requests. Regards, - Van Thank you Mechintel, You are absolutely correct. Needlessly complicated. There is no reason for players on Giradda the Hutt to even so much as VIEW a thread from Veela or Juyo (for example). This has nothing to do with PVE, PVP, RP, etc. It's the simple fact of organization, nothing more, nothing less. Giradda the Hutt players don't care and don't want to be bothered with "spam" from another server. It's again, needless complication.

What's funny is it's not what the customers asked for It's like asking a company for a red door and they turn around and say, well...here's a yellow door. Updated the main post here with the official statement from Bioware. Here is one thing I would like to point out to everyone, they are grouping servers into forums. Obviously we know there's a lot of servers, infact there's too many. There's so many servers that that's a handful that are nearly empty shells. To me, it seems as if Bioware is attempting to save face and cover their mistakes already. They know they screwed up the server organization and divided the overall population in a very unbalanced way. They don't want it to be easily noticed that there are empty servers, so to combat this they are grouping servers. Great idea here, right? Take say, 4-5 servers and roll them into 1 group forum...2 of those servers could be ghost towns....but no one will really ever notice because there's 2-3 high traffic servers rolled in that section. Now let's all take a step back and analyse the situation we're about to get forced upon us (which we did not ask for). We currently have a forum disaster, it's embarrassing. Nothing can be found easily, it's a mess. Bioware is saying they want to make things EASIER for us and ORGANIZE things, yet they are still refusing to give us SERVER FORUMS. Instead we get GROUP FORUMS?! This is not a used car lot, we are not shopping for used cars. We are not paying a monthly fee to talk to used car salesmen. Do not try and sell me a double decker bus when I ask for a 4 door sedan. While I am happy to see Bioware taking steps to correct their mistakes, I am insulted by their motion to disregard the REQUEST.....rather, DEMAND, for server forums and turn around to give us something we did not ask for. We do not want SERVER GROUPS (containing 4 to 5 to 10 servers) we want INDIVIDUAL SERVER FORUMS......so we can COMMUNICATE with OUR SERVER! period

I'd like to direct your attention to something I found earlier today http://www.two-pi-team.de/en/2011/bioware-launches-star-wars-the-old-republic.html So I ask you this, Why is it that the above linked company owns countless SWTOR related domain names? And date of purchase/registration was March 2009? Can we say conflict of interest? Why is that important? Well, quite simply.... either this company did some contract work for Bioware and decided to make a little extra cash on the side by securing any/all related domain names possible for resale to folks like us.....OR Bioware is attempting to collect a little extra off of customers who are "forced" to venture out and create their own community sites.

There's honestly a dozen places just like that. Then there's places for specific servers. The problem is none of them are official and no one is going to use them on a regular basis. It'd probably take 6 months or more to even gain 1,000 members on those places. Case in point, Members: 244 (swtorowned.com) I wish them well but it's honestly a waste of time and money.

You make some good points. Saddly, that is much how it appears Bioware views customers. If Darth Vader was here right now he'd probably stand and say "I find your lack of support distrubing" and probably /forceChoke the CEO.

Sounds great, hope to see you in game - Van

To further note: It's absolutely sad that I find this kinda of stuff on these forums (and the game just came out) From: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=167978

Took me 48 hours to download the game during Beta Took me 6+ hours to download the game for Early Access

Just about every server has SWG vets. With the collapse of SWG, everyone mostly came here. If you don't already have a home, hop over to Giradda the Hutt and look us up (guild info in sig)

You'd be better off saving the negotiated money and putting something on lay-away that isn't old school. In my opinion that's a waste of money. Everything about those specs is old.

Well yes and no, Thing is... a company such as Bioware wouldn't have developers tasked with forum duties. Specific employees would be tasked to handle the forums, that'd be their sole purpose in life. You have the Bioware Community Team for example, comprised of the manager and a handful of staff who frequent the forums (or so we think). It's their duty day to day to manage the forums and represent the company to the customers. What we have here is a lack of responsibilities and management. There's a complete oversight of communication and customer support. It's evident that Bioware feels and views that customer support is nothing more then a glorified tech support role and that it has nothing to do with answering key questions from customers. What Bioware NEEDS is to hire more people and chit-can whoever is currently responsible for managing support. Why? Because there is ZERO support right now. It's a giant FFA fest and no one in Bioware is paying attention. Yes, development priorities are high, the products success makes or breaks the project overall. However, sales and developmet are not all that there is to a company/MMO, support plays a even larger role just as much as the rest. Sales/Support/Development, all go hand in hand in he big picture, right now Bioware is lacking in support by a long shot. What Bioware needs is a Support Manager for the SWTOR department who's got a backbone and who can staff a quality team of support minions that are tasked with supporting all of you (and me). Until Bioware has that, everything from here on out will be a goat rope, or as we used to say in the military (cluster ****) Personally I think we'll still be at square 1. Without any form of official link/location here on this site then it's just a waste of time/effort/money. Majority of the customers will always be directed here and remain here unles otherwise directed by Bioware.

Lies, your link says permission denied!

I've taken the time to copy this thread on a regular basis after they went through and deleted nearly the entire thread (several hundred posts worth) the first week this was posted. If they keep it up I'll be sure to publicly embarrass them It's not rocket science here Bioware. A lot of folks here have done their best to provide constructive feedback, as requested by you. Now it's your turn to give the reach around and provide US some constructive feedback.

I agree in full 8 year SWG vet here

There's been zero response from them since prior to Christmas, in terms of official statements that is. Unsat

Kids in college care about that?

I agree. I've been lurking this site since they first opened it up. Once I lost interest in SWG it was only a matter of time and I've been eager to jump knee deep into this game. Saddly, with the lack of server forums and Bioware's response, it only brings back painful memories of what SOE did to all of us over the course of 8 years in SWG.