A few weeks ago I posted stating that we were working on improving the community relations aspect of SWG, and also working on several other fronts to try to make the game better in general. I thought you might appreciate some info on where we are.

Game info

SWG continues to grow (though of course the rate of growth has slowed from the early days). Most players have still not reached advanced professions. The economy's rate of growth has been cooling a bit, and we're starting to see cyclical economic developments occuring on a weekly cycle. The vast majority of money is still earned via missions, but loot as a percentage of earnings has been rising slowly.

The biggest expenditure is on structure maintenance, followed by travel, skill training, tip surcharges, and cloning.

Most popular advanced professions:

Creature Handler
Pistoleer
Bounty Hunter
Rifleman
Merchant
Most commonly mastered advanced professions:

Creature Handler
Architect
Doctor
Dancer
Weaponsmith
CS

We've been meeting every day to get the top CS issues that cause people to make CS calls, so that we can fix them. This on the grounds that these are among the most important bugs to tackle: both because they irritate players enough to get them to call us, and also because they clog up the CS lines, thus making CS slower for everyone.

I'm happy to report that our response time on CS tickets has fallen by a factor of twenty from a month ago (and so has the number of open tickets at a time and the number of tickets created). You should be seeing much faster and more responsive CS as a result. Before skeptics start screaming, I'll point out that we can see very specific declines in calls occurring when we fix certain bugs and issues. Overall, we hope to continue making significant progress on this front. A big thank you goes out to the hardworking CS staff who have exhibited a lot of grace under enormous pressure--they want your experience to be as good as possible, and they are not the bad guys.

The top issues that tend to get reported these days, and which are therefore our top priorities for fixes include missing items (mostly seem to be related to crossing server boundaries); ghosted items on vendors and the bazaar; skills going missing (still no luck on this one!); people getting stuck in certain places; things warping to 0 0 0; and mission NPCs not spawning at waypoints.

One to call out is houses vanishing--every case we have investigated closely has turned out to be a legitimate deletion. So we're planning on providing CS with a way to get the houses back, and we're looking to change how house deletion from unpaid maintenance works so that we don't have this problem coming up as much.

Community stuff

We've got an events manager now, you've met him (hi, Pex!). The events guys are busily working to ramp things up on that front.

The assistant community manager hunt is about to end, we think. This person will be in charge of communication with the correspondents, and will be on the boards pretty much all the time.

We've got a correspondent forum now so that the devs can discuss things with the correspondents directly without fear that chance remarks will be taken as promises. We realize that many of you want this forum to be public, but we're concerned about letting our devs off the ranch that way. ALL the designers are not only able to, but are required to post to this forum, so we're seeing a lot of communication open up and some very good discussions.

We're enacting policy on how the stuff from that board gets passed out to you guys, so expect this channel of info to open up a bit more soon. Please don't browbeat your correspondents too badly in the interim--they very much want to share everything with you, and we've asked them not to, so their staying relatively quiet is our fault, not theirs.

We also have this forum, which we hope will avoid the noise of the SWG Discussion forum, and provide a more focused area for discussion with the devs. This is intended to be a place where we can float things with zero commitment, so if you see something here, please do not take it a a promise that it will be implemented. It's a place to conceptualize and discuss.

We're also working on improving the patch notes process. The assistant community manager will have this as a primary duty. We expect to float things here, and then as they actually get implemented, we'll post them on In Development. Once they make it to Test Center, they will go on In Testing. Once they are released to you, they'll go in the Update History.

Lastly, there's the polls. We intend to start using this tool a lot more. You should definitely check them out if you haven't already, as we intend to be asking fairly important questions there. We don't intend to become totally poll-driven, but we do want to gather data on where we shoud be spending our efforts. Expect some poll questions to be fairly targeted and specific.

We've got a long list of other community things that we want to do, but we're planning on first getting this stuff working smoothly before rolling out additional things. Hopefully, you are already feeling the effects of more attention being paid to this area.

In summary

I don't want to make any promises--this post is a bit of an experiment. But a "State of the Game" letter periodically is one of the things that we have on our list as something that we feel would be valuable to improve the tone of the boards. Many pointed out in the discussions on community that we needed to make more substantive posts, not just more posts. So this is something in that direction. As it is a bit of an experiment, I'd love to hear what sorts of things you feel would be substantial info for a letter like this.

May the Force be with you!

Message Edited by Holocron on 09-25-2003 11:58 AM

-Raph Koster,

Creative Director