SWTOR Community Manager Eric Musco has been poking around in the past few days on the forums, creating new threads, asking players for feedback and to share thoughts for what they liked in the game since 5.0 and how they would like to see things change for the “elusive 6.0”. Meanwhile a new face has surfaced around the block – Musco’s helper also known as Daniel, the community coordinator.
Do you read the SWTOR forums? Often, rarely, not at all? The SWTOR community manager Eric Musco has been quite active there – asking questions, poking the community for feedback and teasing the “elusive 6.0” or… in his own words “large future update”.Let me be clear, Musco is not mentioning 6.0 as an expansion, nor confirming that the studio is actively working on it. He uses words such as “elusive 6.0” and “large future update” What I am about to present before you here are highlights of his posts and overview of what has been going on in the SWTOR forums (because not much is happening in-game since the release of Update 5.10.1).
Musco has posted several times in various different threads and created a few on his own to collect thoughts, suggestions and general feedback from the active community on what the playerbase currently likes, what systems should be changed and how, what new features should be added, how to improve the game overall and, of course, the upcoming Star Wars Celebration Cantina and a potential interesting reveal during the event.
What is this elusive 6.0 you are speaking of?
Let me spin this around, how would you want to see gear acquired via PvP in a large future update, such as an expansion? Should it be via a commendation system (UCs, PvP tokens, etc)? Should it be drops from boxes? Mission rewards? Yes?
As I said in another thread, discussion are actively on going on not only what new gear will look like, but how it will be acquired. So weigh in on how you see UCs in the future, if at all.
I think even the developers are now realizing the crazy situation the game is currently in when it comes to gearing. The gearing method in SWTOR since 5.0 has gone from weird, through annoying RNG and grind all the way to plainly confusing.
For that teased “large future update” the studio is looking to change something and judging by the quoted text below, they are in the very early planning stages of that. If you have an idea or a suggestion, now would be the best time to share them!
Let’s talk about gearing as I do have a few things I can pass on. So first and the most important, absolutely keep all feedback coming about gearing in every context. What you do and don’t like, what we have done right and what we haven’t. Quite literally the team is having conversations right now about how we will build out gearing in “large future update”.
I do want to state though that there are no large systemic plans changed for 252 / 258. This doesn’t mean we may not make minor tweaks but there are no plans to overhaul how gearing works in tier 5. The reason is the team really wants to focus efforts on the future to ensure that when we get to revamping itemization, it is the best it can be.
To that point, look for me to start spinning up conversations in the coming weeks regarding gearing. I want to try to gather feedback on specific topics as drilled down as I can to ensure the dev team is getting a good summary of feedback. We are in the early stages of planning for the future of itemization and so now is the best time to help shape what we do.
He also responded to reports on issues with the Cartel Market Hair Styles showing up as Green when selected Black by the player. He admitted this is a “fairly complex bug” and shared extensive insights about it.
Cartel Market Hair not showing as black is a fairly complex bug, I want to lift the hood and talk about some process stuff internally that has lead us to where we are right now. We have a pretty strict rule that we do not make changes to Cartel Market items once they are live. This doesn’t apply for seriously broken items such as items that are not functioning or are breaking characters, for example. The reason for this rule is simple, players have spent money for something and changing it after purchasing it means we have adjusted something they spent money on. We have broken this rule before, but it is rare.
The hair color on these hair styles has been bugged for a long time, since they were released. We very recently did another full deep-dive investigation into what exactly was causing this bug, to see if we could fix it, and the overall impact it would have if we adjusted it. Since this is a high visibility issue that is frustrating for players who are seeing it, this is one of those rare cases where we would have considered changing a live CM item.
What our investigation led to is that the way colors are applying to the CM hairstyles isn’t correct. The only place this is noticeable is for black but in truth it is across the spectrum. The downside of this is that if we were to fix the bug that is causing this, it would actually change how every single color looks on CM hairstyles, not just black. That would have a pretty substantial impact on a lot of players and their chosen hair.
With that in mind, we are in a holding pattern on this issue as we are unable to fix it without a broad game impact we are unwilling to make at this time. If we find any way to adjust this in the future, we will, and that investigation is on-going. One thing that did arise from this is that we realized there were incorrect setup steps happening on hair styles which were causing this bug. Future hairstyles will not have this problem.
I know this may not be the greatest of news for those of you with this bug but I wanted to make sure you have all of the information around what is causing this issue and why we aren’t implementing a fix for it at this time.
On another topic, let’s welcome the new face that has appeared on the SWTOR forums – Daniel Steed. Remember that ad for a community coordinator BioWare posted a few months back? Daniel is the person they hired. Why is he speaking publicly just now, what’s his exact role and how much exactly is he getting paid to do that… we’ll get answers to two out of these three questions from Daniels’s own introductory post, quoted below! :)
Hello everyone!
As Musco alluded to in a post last week, I joined the team a few months ago and serve as the new Community Coordinator! Some of you may be now wondering, if I’ve been here for a few months, then why am I just making myself known? Well, let’s go over everything that I work on.
Primarily, I handle everything involved with the articles that we create. This covers the whole process from start to finish. On top of this, I handle all the social posts across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as the game launcher itself. Over the past few months, these were handed to me piece by piece as Musco trained me accordingly. Once I had all these tasks under my belt, it was our plan to start transitioning me from solely working behind the scenes, to having a presence here on the general forums. So here we are!
I have been reading the general feedback here, especially within the past week, and it has been received. There’s a lot that can be improved upon and I’m working on fixing some of these issues. Going forward whenever there’s a new article or news update, I will also create a thread in the relevant forum to spread the word of whatever the subject is, as well as prompt a discussion about it. For example, later this week we will be announcing the specific details involving our community Cantina event happening around Star Wars Celebration in Chicago. At the same time as I publish the article to the site, I will then create a thread highlighting it.
Throughout March we will announce what will be involved with Game Update 5.10.2, between game features and technical updates. I’ve also been working with Charles on something we’d like to bring back, which are short stories. Now since a lot goes into the making of these, it’s hard to pinpoint when the first one will be published. But it’s a safe bet to say it will be sometime this spring.
Another strong sentiment that I’ve noted here is the lack of a roadmap. Unfortunately, while that falls outside of my scope, in the spring/summer I would like to build a web content roadmap. This will list all the planned articles, including update announcements. These wouldn’t have a hard date, but they would all be narrowed down to approximate months. For example, the Game Update 5.10.2 news would be listed as coming in the first half of March in a model like this. I’ve been working a lot behind the scenes to lay down the groundwork for the upcoming year and the fruits of that will start to bear in the upcoming months. Hopefully this post has been able to shed some light on the path we’re taking with 2019!
I’ve spoken to him a bit and my impressions personally are that Daniel seems very eager and passionate to do his job well and keep up with his responsibilities, even take on new ones. Ambition doesn’t seem to be lacking in him. The possible return of the short stories in a more regular format is something every Star Wars lore fan will appreciate!
Let’s all wish him luck! The SWTOR website has been in dire need of regular content updates for years now!
Last, but not least – Roadmap, anyone? Did you know that we were supposed to get a standard SWTOR Roadmap update long ago? It’s almost March of 2019 and we have little to now information on what is actually coming to Star Wars: The Old Republic in 2019. That’s a bit odd. Perhaps they are saving it all for the Star Wars Celebration Cantina event in April.
As of right now all we have in terms of a Roadmap for 2019 is this:
Hey folks,
With 5.10.1 out the door I know you are all curious what is coming next. We have talked about some of this in the past but I want to put a new update all in one place.
- Bugs from 5.10.1 – We still have a few issues that popped out of 5.10.1 (such as Vette causing hitching) that we want to address. Our next planned patch was actually 5.10.2 but we want to get a bug fix patch out sooner then that if we can. It won’t be huge but getting a few of these fixes out soon is something we are actively investigating. I will pass on more details on timing and what will be fixed once I know more.
- 5.10.2 – Our next update is coming… We are prepping a couple of blogs around what you can expect in this update along with getting things staged to get it in your hands on PTS. Look for more info on this update in early March.
- After 5.10.2 – We should have details on our SW Celebration Cantina announced toward the end of February. Join us in Chicago if you can, or just keep your eyes posted on the interwebs during Celebration for more news from us on what is coming this year.
Thanks all.
Ummm… oh, well.
That’s all for now. Keep in touch and sign up to get new posts notifications to stay on top of all SWTOR news on VULKK.com!
