Star Wars Galaxies: Holocron Post on Communication Issues

So, what with all the discussion of the forum closing to non-customers, with all the people asking for one fix or another to professions, all the debates about whether the game is growing or not (it is), all the questions about what to do when maxxed out, and what content needs to be added, and all the rest of what makes up the ferment here on these forums, I thought it might be time to step back a bit and talk about where we are, what we want to do, and where SWG is going.

First off, I want to lay out some core principles that I suspect many of you may disagree with. I want them out there stated as baldly and honestly as possible so that you know exactly where we're coming from.

We want to make you happy.
We want to be open and honest with you.
We want you to enjoy playing the game.
We want to get your feedback so that we can accomplish the above.

Now, I state these like this because the number of people who seem to feel that we are dissembling, misleading, intentionally ignoring, or going on constant nerf campaigns for some bizarre adversarial reason seems to be quite large. Now, I know it's pointless to simply say "you're wrong" to those people, since they have their own view of the matter, but the fact is they're wrong. We're quite honestly all about those bullet points there.

The fact is, we're finding it HARD.

Newark, Birmingham, Las Vegas, St Petersburg, Akron, Baton Rouge... what do these cities have in common? Well, they're in a given population bracket. It happens to be a population bracket SWG shares. I am almost positive that all of those cities have more people on staff than SWG does. They also get considerably more of your money than we do, of course. On the flip side, I am willing to bet that we get more service requests than they do, and a lot of them are tougher to solve. I don't want to stretch the analogy too far, because soon someone will say that the droid engineer profession is comparable to not having the electric grid up in their neighborhood, or something, and it'll start getting silly.

My point is more that we're in the position of mayor and city council and every city service here, on a scale comparable to actual real world cities. "Other games do it," people will state. And I'll state back that first off, there's not many games of this size and secondly, we're being quite a bit more open and direct in our contact with customers than pretty much all other games of our size. This has its advantages and disadvantages.

One of them is the challenge of even listening. No day goes by when I don't get someone complaining that we haven't posted in their profession's forum, or that we're not current on the issues for that profession. After all, "there's dozens of threads on the front page right now about it, open any of 'em."

The fact is, we're hard-pressed to read just the threads we do, and then follow-up on our posts-much less skim every forum. The detailed answers people want to both correspondents and to their own posts take a sizable amount of time to research and then answer. When I say sizable, I mean anything over ten minutes.

This is of course what the correspondent program was intended to address. But what we found was that in the correspondent's lists, around half the list or more were line items that could EACH take three or four hours to discuss, much less arrive at an answer. And the result was, we blew it. We blew it bad, because we invited the commentary and the input, and then failed to uphold our end of the bargain.

We post an extraordinary amount to these forums-but it appears we're not posting the right things. I posted over thirty times yesterday. There're over 120 posts from developers in the last week.

So the question I am here to pose to you today is, how do we do better? Hiring infinite staff isn't a viable answer-we need to figure out a way to work with you guys smarter.

Because I hope that you agree with those bullet points that I started out with. I don't doubt that some proportion of you will always view us as the bad guys, or build conspiracy theories (really, the conspiracies rarely make sense-we're not that smart, guys). But what I want, what I hope we all want, is a sense of trust. We're not perfect, and never will be. When there's 1500 changes in an update, we're occasionally going to forget to write one of them down, and you'll get a stealth change. But we're not doing it on purpose-there's no percentage for us in it. It makes our lives harder.

Thoughts?

If we can solve the communication problems, I suspect we can go a long way towards tackling the gameplay issues.

-Raph Koster,
Creative Director