SOE Producer Lorin "DeadMeat" Jameson stopped by the official forums with another Producer Note. In this edition, DeadMeat talks about Chapter 8 and lays out plans for a new way of managing updates:

Hi Folks,

It has been pretty busy around here lately with the start of the new year and the release of Chapter 8 earlier this week but I have finally had a chance to catch my breath and drop the community a note.  We are all very excited about C8 and the great response we have had so far.  I think the new space content is a very cool addition to the game and we as a team definitely learned a lot in the process.  The space game in SWG is very good and I encourage folks who have not done much adventuring in space to definitely give it a try. The Pilot community in Star Wars Galaxies is great and definitely willing to help out folks who do not have a lot of experience in The Deep...Of course they are also quite willing to blow you into atoms if you would like as well.

We will be doing things a little differently this year in terms of our releases to Live.  We always felt that the gaps between chapters seemed too long, and sometimes we could not be as responsive to what was going on in the live game as we would like.  We have decided going forward that we are going to operate on two tracks in our release schedule, with one track focused on what we are calling Updates and another track focused on Content.  Our Update track will address the most pressing issues in the game as identified by Customer Support, Quality Assurance, and the Community team's take on what are players are discussing most as well as picking out one or two areas of the game to give some extra attention to.  For the first half of the year we will be working through each of the professions and other constituencies.  We will be starting with Smugglers and Spies and we have started feedback threads (Smugglers, Spies) in each of their forums to help us guide what we are doing.  We will also be using the top five issues that each of the Senators has collected to lay the ground work for this.  These will be released on about a four week basis.  It should be understood that we will not be doing major revamping of professions during these updates, but mostly trying to ensure that we give each group some attention on a regular basis.

The Content track will be focused on adding new, quite apropos, content into the game on a regular basis.  We will be using this track to add new Heroics, quests, collections, storyteller features, and new game systems into SWG.  We want to be sure that we have a constant stream of new stuff into the game that will appeal to all members of the community.  We spent a lot of time last year building the framework for delivering cool content into the game and we want to leverage that as much as possible in the coming months.  We will start with a new Exar Kun Heroic (as voted on by the community) as well as some new collections (and collection types) and some Storyteller additions.  Content Track releases will happen on approximately eight week intervals.

2008 is shaping up to be a great year for Star Wars Galaxies and I have never seen the team working as hard or as efficiently as I have seen them in the last few months. The amount they accomplished to put together C8 is amazing. This is really a fantastic group of devs who are energized by this product and the new things that are coming up.

Enjoy the new Chapter!

DeadMeat

Lorin W. Jameson, Producer, Sony Online Entertainment