Yesterday we saw something we’re rather unaccustomed to these days– official SWTOR forum dev tracker activity! Joveth Gonzalez, Community Manager, issued a message to the community and proceeded to stick around and chat with some of the forum community members a bit.
Here’s an excerpt from the message, which can be read in full here:
Originally posted by JovethGonzalez (Source)
As most of you know, over the past few months, our team, our studio, and our game have undergone quite a few changes. Through it all, we’ve remained committed to the community and have worked with the development team to make sure that your voices were heard.I wanted to take some time to reassure you all that my team, the community team, is still committed to you folks. As part of this commitment, we’re excited to let you know that we have been developing a brand new strategy for our team that focuses on developing new ways to bring you more information about the game and the people involved with SWTOR’s development.
As we progress towards the recently announced Free-to-Play experience, you can expect more frequent updates to the game (which means more information coming to you) and more developer interactions.
Joveth Gonzalez then went on to say that him and his team will be becoming more active on the forums, and refocusing their attention to SWTOR’s community as a whole.
Truth be told, BioWare staff activity has been rather slim pickings on the forums lately, and except for the F2P news, it’s been a while since we’ve heard any significant updates. Without new information and updates to have fun with and speculate over, the forums have become filled with the negative and sometimes harsh opinions of players. This caused the forum community to wonder on more than one occasion if the forums were even being actively monitored.
With all this in mind, both this message and a busy dev tracker were indeed somewhat reassuring. Unfortunately, however, we’ve heard many of these words before in previous messages to the community, so many players are understandably feeling a little wary. I suppose we’ll just have to see how the dust settles. This is one of those situations where actions speak louder than words.
After this message to the community was posted, BioWare also posted a Forum Policy Update. Here’s the gist of the update:
You may find that threads that are not constructive are removed or closed without warning. Here are some things we consider unconstructive:
- Long lists of gripes with few specific details and little useful feedback
- Threads that bash the game or BioWare
- Threads about quitting the game
- Callouts towards specific developers
- “Haters” vs “fanboys” arguments/unconstructive community commentary
We strongly recommend brushing up on the Rules of Conduct, as violations are generally more serious now.
SWTOR’s forums could definitely use a good cleanup, and getting rid of some of the arguments, BioWare-bashing threads, and general negativity are probably a necessary step in doing so. The forums aren’t currently very inviting to new players with all of the negativity, and that can do nothing but hurt the game’s population at this point.
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