Star Wars Galaxies: Now introducing.. JustG

Today, JustG made his first appearance on the official forums. Here is what he had to say.

Hello,

My name is Gary Gattis, and I am the new Sr. Producer on Star Wars Galaxies. Today seems like a great time to introduce myself to the community. I was hired to assist with the existing software development processes, and I have been here for all of a week. I have been involved in various aspects of gaming for 10 years or so, and my history also includes large-scale Enterprise Software development.

First of all I want to give you an overview of where we are. Clearly yesterday's patch did not go as well as we had hoped. All clusters are currently up and running. We are still experiencing some aftershocks, so today there may be brief periods where we take a server down to gather data to help us track down a fix. We will give you as much warning as possible and try to minimize the downtime.

Our number one priority is gaining server stability. J Allen Brack (Blair) will be posting a high level overview of the issues from a technical point of view shortly, but I want you to know that the team here continues to be fully committed to fixing all aspects of the game as soon as possible. We are indeed conducting an internal post-mortem on the patch and will be implementing some more formal software development methodologies to try and prevent these issues from recurring and improve the quality of our patches in general. I would welcome constructive advice from the community on how you think we could improve this process.

Our number two priority is getting gameplay issues fixed asap. All unintended byproducts of the patch are being tracked down and will be fixed (more on this in a bit). This is as passionate a community as I have ever seen, and I want to make sure that you are aware that you ARE being heard... loud and clear! The devs do read the boards all the time, and threads are being forwarded to us by CS and the community reps constantly. We have a new assistant community manager starting on Monday, and he will begin posting in these threads to let you know that your concerns are being heard. I wish he would have started yesterday... it would have been a heck of a first day.

After the high priority issues with the patch have been solved, we will return to our regularly scheduled Bug Friday, which is focused on fixing individual professions as quickly as possible. This means that at least 20% of our development time is being directed to rapid-turnaround of profession issues, in addition to the regularly scheduled improvements.

The correspondents program has been a great help in getting your voices heard as well. Your correspondents are there for you. We have asked them to begin to pull together a list of patch-specific issues to forward to us. So how can you as a community member help? It would be tremendously helpful if you would post clear and concise notes about what you have found in the appropriate threads. I understand that you need to vent as well, but please refrain from flaming us too hard in the threads that are asking for specific information! Rest assured that we are reading the flames as well, and paying close attention the constructive criticism that is an inevitable byproduct of yesterdays' patch.

I am fully aware that these are just words, and what you really want is results. To this end we will be putting up a sticky on the announcements page that contains a list of items that we are looking at, if they have been verified by QA, notes on the issue, an expected resolution date, and a closed date. We will continue to update this list until all the current update issues are dealt with.

In closing, I want to thank the entire Development team and Customer Support team for their efforts, they really do have your best interests in mind. Most of all, I really want to thank you for your patience. We are doing everything in our power to continue to improve this game for you. We are committed to fixing existing issues and adding exciting new content. Some truly amazing things are on the way (mounts, player cities, vehicles - and the SPACE EXPANSION next year!!!). I am thrilled and honored to be working on such a great game... and May the Force be with you!

Best,
- Gary 'JustG' Gattis