Development Cycle Archive

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SasKarna wrote:

. . . if they post ideas and lets us ADD to them, modify them or at least input to them. they can CONCENTRATE on each idea that much better. . .

never again wondering, did they read my idea, did they like it, did they read i hated it. you know they are more likely to see you point and acknowledge it. good job SOE.

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The problem is its thier choosing which topics to discuss. You may have a brilliant idea, but whos going to read it in the galaxie forum?? A Mod or a Dev? The need is to increase communication between the Devs and the community, the problem is it appears they are creating a "one way" street. Are they really interested in hearing what we think? I would love to hear a response from a Dev concerning the level of communication we will recieve in the galaxie and profession forums!

Again I welcome the renewed vigor to communicating with us, lets just hope thier not blowing smoke up are arses!

VolatileMan

I was an avid poster for a while back (beta days and post launch). In all honesty I stopped because I felt that my comments where for a lack of better terms "being lost in the wash". So may comments where not focused on the development cycle that there IMHO was no point to the maddness. The tide has been changing over the last several months andwith these changes I believewe have returned to astate of
productive process where we are not just a sounding board but a voice for possitiveprogressive input.

The changes that are occurring put the community back on track for constructive input at every stage of
development. Any developer worth their salt knows that the ultimate long term success of anyMMORPH
requires that you work through the community,and these changes put us (the Star Wars GalaxiesCommunity) right in the thick of development. When developers have to spend HOURS going though postto weed out whatcan be applied to the game, it is not a dynamic enough process to beproductive over any period more the a few days. After a week the information become daunting after a month it is insurmountable.

We want our voices to be heard, our ideas to be weighed and our concerns to be addressed. The changes
make us part of a process now. We are now intergrated into a schedule of development with a timeline that
allows for real changes to take place well before a publish occurs. Thank you for these most desperately needed changes.

Blackjack Nova
www.swgrebels.com

/cheer to R2DADROID!

                          .=+.             ------------------
                  \`--._,'.::.`._.--'/   _/ May the CU       \
Acktu - Sunrunner   .  ` __::__ '  .   _/ \ be with you      /
Beta 3, JTL,          -:.`'..`'.:-         ------------------
ROTW & TOW Beta tester  \ `--' /
                          `--'

Thunderheart, with all due respect:

Disposing of the SWG Discussion forum is not a really good idea, it is a forum where we can discuss the game and post ideas about making it better in general (the post on Sabacc(sp?)) is one such example.

I was disturbed when forums went to members only, thinking it appeared that SOE was trying to cover up complaints and member opinions from getting out.

I am even more distressed now that the most vocal (good and bad) forum is being closed and swept under the rug. This has the appearance to me as SOE covering up it's shortcomings by dispersal of negative posts. I love SWG and will continue to be a member no matter what, but it is easier for me to recruit and retain new members when they can learn about the game's nuances by reading about them. ( I have gotten about 4-5 other people to start playing)

Please consider my words as I only mean for them to help the community and the game. I do not want to sound rude, threatening, or any other negative way.

Thank you

The removal of a general discussion board in my opinion hinders the ability of the player community from discussing issues between each other. Sure, we can discuss in our own profession and galaxy forums but not all views will be clearly expressed there. A suggestion made and agreed by a single profession may affect directly and indirectly many other professions who's view will not be properly expressed since not many monitor forums outside their galaxy and chosen professions.

A neutral ground is needed to ease the communication between the galaxies and professions. It is far easier to monitor a single board than monitor all profession and galaxy forums. You say you want more "focused" ideas channeled into you. However those ideas will not contain the views of the whole community. You may then decide it's a good idea and submit it to the scrutiny of the whole community but that's an extra step that could have been avoided if they were more largely discussed before.

You may not wish to engage in such a forum but that is your prerogative. If your goal is to ease the communications and help the community, a place where all of us can discuss regardless of profession and server is needed.

One final thought I would wish developers to ask themselves. Who do you think knows more about basketball: James Naismith or Michael Jordan?

Thunderheart wrote:

The SWG Discussion Forum will be removed to help focus game development discussions and make sure that community suggestions, comments and contributions are catalogued in forums that will be read and tracked by the development team. Please use your Galaxy forums for general SWG discussions.

We want to keep the best parts of the SWG discussion forum, so we encourage comments about what other types of forums would be a benefit to the community with the knowledge that they will not get developer attention.

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IMHO the SWG Discussion Forum was a good place to talk to people from OTHER galaxies and hear what they had to say and not just keep ourselves limited to the experiences on ONE server. Your suggestion to use our specific Galaxy forum for discussion forces us to either limit ourselves to one server unless we really want to read every single galaxy's forum.

I can understand your desire to keep development issues to a few focused forums but instead of asking us to keep ourselves isolated to our respective servers I think you should replace the SWG Discussion Forum with some sort of Intergalactic Meeting Room that would be for the purpose of cross galaxy discussion.

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RyceSWG wrote:

I understand that we're going for a structured method for the discussion and evaluation of new ideas... but these "clear channels of communication" it would seem will only exist for ideas that are NOT player ideas/wish lists. And surely we've come up with a few good ones so far?

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That's my thought exactly... won't the only ideas we'll be commenting on soon be Dev Idea's? Which means we have our hands tied now as to what major stuff gets added to the game...

*dev one rolls a dice* "Well it came up 3, lets check the chart... okay they want xxxx added... Lets post it up and see!"

**week later**

*dev two* "Nope it seems they didn't want that... roll again! 3gets are-roll..."

Cotla Charre- Staff Sergeant
Starsider

Does anyone know for sure what it takes to be a Correspondent any more?

Back when the program started, people were to send in applications, and they were to be rotated so that several people had a shot at it. Well, the rotations never happened except by attrition, but then the process began changing again. Only certain positions started getting the application notice, while others were mysteriously filled out of the blue. Many of them the public didn't even know would be opening, and were filled by people with only minimal involvement in the community.

A disturbing trend has been arising . . . they're being filled by Thunderheart's friends. People who have been in his PA, posted on his old web site, known him since Beta, etc. The average community member never had a chance. And I'm not pulling this idea out of the air . . . I've been posting with these people myself for three years now. They are GREAT PEOPLE. But that doesn't make it right.

With the new "communication pipeline", it's more important than ever that those people who are representing the community are THE COMMUNITY. People who represent the average player and will listen to everyone equally, not a Dev's friend, mayor, PA-mate, etc. People who got the Corro job because of their interaction with us, not because of their interaction with them off-hours.

With the efforts to improve communication, I ask that you show your support for making all positions for Correspondents equally available, not available to the public only if TH doesn't have a friend that fits the role.

The entire thread can be found here: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=999404

Please note that there would be no place for this type of discussion if the discussion forum was removed, because VERY few people server-hop to hang out on other server boards. Unfortunately, I'm with the crowd who thinks that's exactly what you guys want at this point, to make sure that we can't have organized discussions of this type across the game, thus making it look like tiny voices in a huge sea when we are unhappy. I agree, and even argued with the Mods about it on several occasions as Jee can tell you, something did need to be done with the Discussion forum, because there was no clear-cut designation of what really belonged there and what didn't. But I think with a better description and purpose a forum where we can start our OWN topics and be assured that all galaxies can read them and post on them, AND that the devs will poke their heads in as well, is very necessary to communication.

~~Shabhaii, Mayor of Tombra, Naboo
www.cityoftombra.com
The REAL BT
(Snitter): There isn't any island, Rowf...
(Rowf): There is... there... can't you see it... Our island...just stay with me.. I'll get you there..

OK TH.

Why in God's green earth are you ignoring the JEDI community?

It looks like the you the DEV"s are setting up a one way comminication here... where you only get to choose what issues you post on and what you want replies on.

All other boards you say will not get DEV attention so tell me how the community is expect to be heard on the non dev issues??

I am really really annoyed that not one developer has bothered to comment on the jedi commnities issues.

We dont have a coreespondant, we have a ton of bugs most of which you applied at the last patch and admitted such as well as promised to hotfix the errors out. (not happened)

I doubt you'll even bother to reply to my post here. Let me give you a hint here...

It is better to say "I don't know we are working on it by such and such a date" than to say NOTHING AT ALL

If you really do care about the community then prove it by talking to JEDI.

We worked our butts off and the least you can do is reply.

Thanks

Very annoyed and frustrated customer.

K.

Supply and Demand

The customers seem to demand a place where they can whine and moan about nearly everything. Why not make a forum dedicated to that and spare everyone else having to read endless I quit and this game blows rants.

Then make another forumn specificaly for game change suggestions and militantly delete anything else that shows up there.

I realize it may be impolotic to have a rant forumn but it would give you a good excuse to delete any ranting posts that showed up in other forumns and makes it clear you support peoples abbility to speak their mind. Anyone who would be offended by such speach could simply not read that forumn. I know I wouldn't.

It is not clear in your post where people will be making the suggestions for the "pie in the sky" changes.

Hey. Thunderheart’s thread on the Development forum got deleted by mistake.

Here’s what you wrote in case you want to post it again when the thread gets reposted tomorrow:


Just a quick suggestion for the In Concept board:

In order to facilitate the direction of people's ideas, in the absence of being able to start our own threads, will you all periodically pull ideas that seem to have potential from a broader thread in order to focus ppl's ideas into really fleshing it out?

For example: In Concept about Droids. Person A starts a great idea about combat droids. Person B has a great idea about utility droids. Person C starts a discussion about how droids should fit into a SW game and their role. Now, instead of all of this being under a huge thread with ideas criss-crossing every which way, will these best ideas be drawn off into separate threads by the Devs so that each can get a focus. This doesn't mean every idea that gets its own thread is a definite to move to the next level. On the contrary, I'd like to see several competing ideas get their own threads so that each can be fleshed out and compared in full (ie. one idea for combat droids vs. a different idea).

Maybe you all are considering this already. In any case, as with most things in SWG, this sounds like it has a LOT of potential. I hope its delivery can live up to its promise. I have faith in ya Devs...

--Djibutul

Fantastic Idea. I love the fact that there will be some sort of coordinated effort to go through these items. Let chatting go back to the individual galaxy boredz. IMO the General Chat had degraded into lots of whining and name calling to the point that a vast majority of players did not want to go there. Watch the flames rise here even though I am not saying everyone there was a whiner or a name caller.

Still, it seems like a very organized way of getting feedback and ideas on items that you are planning on putting into the system. As far as all of the Naysayers go I think it is the best idea and implementation of community feedback I have seen from a Dev group. This will allow those of us wanting to add input to the game and its direction without having to go through a myriad of other non-related or useless posts. Individual issues with professions or galaxies can now be taken up on their perspective forumns and will make those forumns more popular and usefull!!!

Good Job! Great organization of this behemoth of a bulletin board.

I just want to publicly give R2DADROID a big thanks for saving last night's thread. Not only did he save it, but e-mailed my response to me so I could repost (see above).

Thanks a ton, it's very, very much appreciated!

/deepbow

--Djibutul