Smed Speaks

[Anach]

http://soe.lithium.com/swg/board/messag ... 759#M37759

Last weekend we had our first ever Influencers Summit. It was a lot of fun, and I have to say I learned quite a bit. We deliberately brought people in that were some of our biggest criitics. We wanted to hear directly from them and understand the issues they had.

At one point I spent an hour or so talking with a group of the Star Wars Galaxies players that had come. It was a very interesting and enlightening discussion, and I wanted to thank all of them for their candor.

I wanted to make sure I close the loop on that discussion because I walked away with some new priorities.

Here are my thoughts:

1) Content is the single biggest thing people playing SWG want. - this surprised me. From our perspective we had thought revising the systems in the game (i.e. expertise revamps) was a bigger deal. While they did say this was important, I was susprised they ranked this higher than working on PVP.
2) This lead to a discussion about involving the community in the decision making process. They pointed out that we do a lousy job at this, and they're right. As such, you can expect a poll in the near future to help us prioritize things for the next 6-12 months.
3) Guild Management tools in SWG aren't up to snuff - I went ballistic when I heard you can only manage your guild through the terminal. We need to fix this.
4) Server consolidation - we need to fasttrack this - it's a very hard problem, and the team has had other priorities.
5) We need to explain ourselves and the thinking behind changes a lot better
6) Once we got past the "please bring back the pre-NGE servers" (no, we're never going to do that) the discussion really got down to brass tacks. Many people ask me why I don't post a lot here, and the simple answer is that it's hard to follow a thread when many of the posts end up being "bring back pre-NGE servers" and other issues we've moved past. Please don't misunderstand me on this - I get why some people want this. It's just that it isn't possible and at some point if we're going to move the game forward new ideas are at the top of the list of things we should be discussing. That's my view anyways.

Smed

[sbartow]

I think server consolidation ought to be at the top of the list. Once the game looks popualted (instead of deathly pale from subscription bleeding) it'll be a lot more fun. Since Crafting Expertise is about to pass through, there will be plenty more people to sell to and compete with as well.