1981

I’m sad that my admiral Ackbar with 2handed sword wasn’t quoted in that post.

1982

Kinda skeezy cherry picking positive quotes from the tester forum…

1983

You’re really surprised at that… that a company making a product will publicize positive reactions to it?

… as opposed to a car company showing people who’ve been run over by their cars?

… as opposed to movie companies putting big quotes in its ads like this: “It sucked!” “Horrible direction!”

… as opposed to Microsoft linking to Tom Chick’s review of Age of Empires Online?

There’s certainly things that can be criticized about SWTOR, but I don’t think the fact that BioWare publicizes positive reactions to their game is one of them.

1984

No, I’m with him on this one. There’s an NDA. People are not allowed to talk publicly about the game, either positive or negative. Cherry-picking positive stuff for PR purposes is poor form when you’ve legally banned people from saying anything negative in public.

1985

Ok, I’ll grant you that point… the NDA does change things since it’s not an even playing field.

Still, I don’t know why anyone would be surprised a company is showing only positive quotes of a game they’re trying to sell.

1986

No-one surprised, just not sure we’ve seen it that often (if at all) from companies using private beta tester comments. It’s a little strange.

1987

I’m fairly certain they have people monitoring impressions and hopes. That release is probably an attempt to counterbalance the overwhelming “meh” that most non-rabid-fanboi forums are generally leaning towards. The “meh” may be a result of those impressed respecting the NDA and not posting much.

If their game is solid and awesome removing the NDA would go along way.

I remember original WoW-beta, it got so much momentum from people openly discussing it.

1988

They announced recently that same-sex romance arcs will be introduced post-launch. Forums went predictably ape, and the official thread is now closed. Good to see BW returning to the Gaider Doctrine, the whole “nope, no gays in this galaxy” thing was creepy whoever it originated from. (BW, LA, EA, etc)

1989

so I heard they cancel rest of the beta weekends.

1990

Bioware has posted as recently as yesterday talking about invitations to upcoming beta weekends. While it’s certainly possible that things changed today, and definitely possible that customer reps either don’t know what’s going on, or are deliberately not being open, it seems more likely that you’re hearing an unsubstantiated, possibly deliberately malicious rumor.

1991

I just find the whole NPC relationship thing creepy, period, gay or not-gay. Well, not so much the fact that relationships are there, but that people care one way or another so much.

Here’s an idea: if you want to roleplay a relationship with your character, lucky for you it’s an MMO, so guess what! Plenty of people to have your man-on-woman, man-on-man, or Greedo-on-wookie sexcapades with… no matter what Bioware says on the matter.

1992

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=8927958#edit8927958

Hello all,

There is no Beta Testing Weekend scheduled for this weekend. There may be further Beta Testing Weekends during September, but we’re not going to guarantee it. The weekend that just finished was really our first dry run of Beta Testing Weekends as a whole, and we have plenty of data to crunch, and decisions to make before we start things up again.

Further to that, as Chris Collins explained in another thread, we are about to roll out a major new build for The Old Republic. That build won’t be ready for this weekend. Just as we did not feel it was a good decision to ask potential EU testers to download our client only to have to download it again, the same applies for this weekend.

That does not mean, however, that as soon as our new build is available we’ll be rolling out a Beta Testing Weekend immediately. As with any new build of the game, we need to get feedback from internal testing and our ongoing Game Testing program before rolling it out to a massive audience. That process takes a while, and that time varies depending on how testing goes.

We rolled out this previous weekend as a relatively small scale event; from now we will do bigger and bigger events, but that doesn’t mean it happens every weekend. When we do resume, we’ll be inviting many more people in.

While many of you are excited and anxious to know what’s happening regarding Testing Weekends, I want to point out that a lot of posts on the subject with a lack of corresponding posts from us does not mean that we’re not listening, or not aware of your interest. It shows your interest in the topic, which is understandably high, but we will not always be able to react instantaneously.

In the past couple of days we’ve been preparing a comprehensive FAQ regarding Game Testing Weekends as a whole, along with some details about the weekend that just happened. We’ll post that tomorrow - in all languages, as we know the subject is of interest to everyone.

1993

Which is fine, but if

Well, not so much the fact that relationships are there, but that people care one way or another so much

refers to caring the orientation, well, if that sort of thing is in and they’ve been fair minded about it in the past, I care about them stepping back from that to please the Star-Wars-made-my-son-gay demographic.

If it refers to “caring too much” as in the people on the BW forums with little organizations and petitions to make sure Wrex marries Morrigan or whatever, well, I’m not into it but to each their own.

1994

Regarding Idrisz’s last post:

This is old news, and in any case, some people who were in the first beta weekend have already received email indicating that they will be invited back to the next one (which will require a new client download.). So it appears that the beta weekends are not done, but last week’s announcement that they are not going to be held every weekend brought out all sorts of doomsayers who interpreted this as a sign that the game had already failed.

Sigh.

1995

so yeah that’s the part I don’t get it, my friend said he got an email saying they will invite previous tester back.

Is that all previous testers or randomly among the previous testers? cause email didn’t contain anything else.

1996

Honestly, I’m kind of switched off the day-to-day SWTOR kremlinology and testing debates. It seems like their plans are gone awry and superfans are in an uproar and all of that is just a turnoff. The game’ll be out in a few months.

1997

AIUI it’s specifically inviting the last group which participated in the weekend beta test. They had problems with the last (only?) weekend beta test so they are specifically inviting that group back to give them a hopefully more problem free experience.

1998

aaah, the last day of beta had crazy lag apparently.

that’s good to know, I shall disperse more info if my buddy decides to play beta some more in coming weekend.

1999

Have you never read a book or watched a movie with a romance plot? As games make all other elements interactive, so to do they allow you to direct the romance too.

I don’t see how this is different to how a game allows you to shape other aspects of the narrative.

I suspect people care because it’s something very easy to associate with. Which is probably why romance books are popular and almost every movie has a romance plot in there somewhere.

2000

The dev post quoted above makes it sound like they’re farther off from release than I’d been hoping. I was thinking they might get out in December, but if they’re still hemming and hawing about beta weekends and talking about data crunching and decisions to be made, it seems like release is fairly far off.