(sorry, I didn't mean for this to get long, but I've just spent all week binging The Newsroom on HBOMax. If you don't know what that is it is a 10 year old show about a fictional cable news network trying to fight the fight to make "real" news instead of "internet" news......so...this got more preachy than I first thought it would but I'm deciding to go with it)
What could they possibly say?
Realistically, from the point of view of people who have bosses and have to make decisions that will directly affect the work environment, and possibly their own employment....
What would appease you in terms of a response?
Obviously, I'm not an employee of EA or Bioware, not in the gaming industry at all. I do tech support in a corporate environment. I've also, interestingly enough, about 20 years ago, spoken to someone in a small company trying to make a game that...if I remember correctly...was supposed to be some kind of hybrid between GTA and...I think something called Fable. I had a conversation with the brother of a friend who was one of the "leaders" at that studio and we talked about the ability of being able to course correct in the middle of a project.
He said, it wasn't really an option because by the time they would know if they had a mistake, money and time would have been spent and they could not simply throw it away and start over.
I was coming at it from the point of view as someone who had delusions of being a novelist. A writer can, unless under a deadline, toss everything and start over.
Game companies, programmers for projects as a whole (I would imagine) can't.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, by the time they put this (or any patch) on PTS they are too far in the process to just simply stop and change the course. it is not for making major changes. It's for us to see if there is anything truly game breaking, and possibly even little thing. Maybe even some of those little things can be fixed. They can't scrap an entire system 2 months before the scheduled release, especially when that time frame is around a Holiday.
(I get you want the Holiday sales. I get the game was released around Christmas so the 10 year anniversary expansion scheduled for the same time would be a pretty good thing if it worked)
Where does that leave people now?
I'm seeing a lot of forum posts from user names I don't recognize coming out in droves saying how horrible the changes are.
I'm seeing a lot of chat in fleet about how horrible the changes are.
I'm seeing some players who say they're coming back and liking the new changes.
an interesting fact: I asked one, in fleet chat, what, specifically, they liked.
it was the ability to have the secondary combat style. Play through the BH story while using Sniper combat skills (as an example, I don't remember the combination they picked, if they even told me).
I get that. I really do. That's pretty cool.
I have over 100 characters on Star Forge between 3 accounts. I don't say this a bragging / flexing...just as an explanation as to why it isn't AS cool for me. In this case I know I'm the exception, not the rule.
a side fact that most people should know by now about real life: Most people HATE change. Doesn't matter what it is, change = bad MOST of the time as the initial "knee-jerk" reaction.
7.0 is a pretty drastic change from all of 6.X
There are fundamental changes in 7.0 that I don't like.
Mostly about conquest.
Only SOME people really care about conquest and conquest isn't anywhere close to the main point of the game as a whole. Most of the different areas of the game feed into conquest, but as conquest isn't priority one of the game, as a whole...changes to that, if they were the only major changes....I could live with that. I already did live through that, a few times, as did many who still play the game. So conquest changes are really only a minor point.
I don't like most of the changes I've seen so far.
I even looked up the ending dates of my subscriptions.
June 13th / July 16th / July 17th
I've said in other threads I may cancel two of these.
I have some time before I have to make that decision.
but getting back to the OP, they can only say a few things, realistically.
"We're looking at ALL of our social media sources and see the vast amount of incredible feedback we're getting and we thank you for that."
Something to that effect.
Also, the responses we've seen, really since PTS, but especially in the last 24 hours, is precisely the reason why this game company CAN NOT announce these type of changes far enough in advance for alterations to go into effect.
No one can make EVERYONE happy. Not some of the time, not even for just a single moment in time.
This game is owned / run / whatever by a publicly traded company and the corporate overlords have stock dividends and investors and all kinds of stuff that comments on these boards could, at worst case scenario, cause real world problems for people who know nothing about this game.
I'm not saying don't use the forums to voice your opinion.
I'm just saying don't expect what can't be given due to things in life that are larger than just a video game.
