Between the announcement of Update 1.3: Allies and BioWare Austin's 'restructuring,' one might say it's been a bittersweet week for Star Wars: The Old Republic. We discuss both of these major events in this week's SWTOR column.

The ‘restructuring’ announced for Star Wars: The Old Republic is a bit hard to accurately gauge at the moment. As many have mentioned, this sort of thing is par for the course after a major MMO launch. The difference here is that BioWare has repeatedly been on record stating that they intended to keep the development team on as is in order to make major contest pushes and significantly grow the game. Clearly, on some level this is no longer the case.

Read more of Michael Bitton's Star Wars: The Old Republic: A Bittersweet Week.

I see warhammer style management coming to swtor; small patches, cool new feature promises that never get released,  game run in a way to get the most cash out of people with as little investment as needed.

I feel bad for thinking this. I really do. I want to see everyone do well. However, I'm glad SWTOR is becoming the laughing stock of MMOs. Maybe now future games will actually start to think, "You know what? Maybe we need to think of something new."

I don't want anyone to lose their jobs, though.

This game is just not built to retain interest. There have been countless threads pre-development on their forums and they all went completely ignored.

You want a single-player story? Okay. It's worth 50 bucks. No doubt about that. But a monthly fee? Not even close.

It would've been worth a monthly fee had they included social elements, e.g., larger worlds fit for housing and guild structures, a true world pvp conflict between light and dark, incentives to dwell in all areas of the game (no need to go to tattooine after you leveled through it etc), deep space content etc.

As of now, you are paying monthly to play KoTOR 1 & 2. What did they think was going to happen? I cannot believe how stupid their team was/is. Worst planning EVER.

I can almost hear them all thinking "Warzones will keep them occupied."

UHhh - 1.3 is NOT good news.  Look, I don't know what the mmorpg writers see as being so incredible about the legacy system...??  It has been the focus of every single patch/news release related to the game since 1.2.  Instead of addressing the real problems with the game (complete and utter lack of end game content) patches and resources continue to be invested in the fluff and pointless legacy system.

The news that 1.3 will be yet another patch dealing with legacy crap is NOT a good thing.

Good luck to all those who lost their jobs yesterday--I feel awful for all of you. Thanks for your work on SWTOR, and I hope some other company snaps you all up in a heartbeat!

Do they not have 1.3 million players anymore?  That is still a boatload of money if each one is paying $15.00 a month. 

As long as the people who received the axe were the ones responsible for some of the horrible design choices, I feel no sympathy whatsoever and I hope your future endevaours in gaming are just as bad as what you developed/programmed.

Thats the way most of players felt like when they started playing SWTOR, BITTERSWEET!  Iam only sorry for the people who lost there jobs because of incompentence of ones in charge. And do you think that they will get fired !?!

They should have fired the decision makers and devs responsible for the game being the way it is, that would have freed up millions of dollars in salary that could have been used to pay the people that got laid off.

https://twitter.com/#!/georgeb3dr/status/205007250765520898

http://twitter.com/#!/rockjaw

ouch.

Originally posted by crysent

UHhh - 1.3 is NOT good news.  Look, I don't know what the mmorpg writers see as being so incredible about the legacy system...??  It has been the focus of every single patch/news release related to the game since 1.2.  Instead of addressing the real problems with the game (complete and utter lack of end game content) patches and resources continue to be invested in the fluff and pointless legacy system.

 

The news that 1.3 will be yet another patch dealing with legacy crap is NOT a good thing.

I agree with you up to a point.  I think when the game launched they ranted and raved about the 4th pillar being story and all that, however when you finish your story that's it..there's none left.  I don't complain that there's no endgame, there's enough raids in there right now for a game this young and at least the newest one is challenging enough to hold some over for a while.

Still, in my opinion this game drops the ball on a  lot of things.  There's no 4th pillar here, there's a quick blurb of  character story in between moving from planet to planet on the rails they set you on until you finish at which point even your companions rarely even want to talk to you (Assuming you've built up their affections to max).

The game moved too fast and was too easy for way too many people.  I played and enjoyed myself up until about 3 weeks ago when I realized this 4th pillar isn't really a thing at all.  They have people on the same treadmill that WoW does; grind hard mode flashpoints to get some raid gear, raid to get better gear to do the next raid.  Only difference is that WoW does it better.

There's no player economy, their silly token system pretty much destroyed any chance of people making anything anyone would ever want.  There's no space game to speak of.  Sure the rail shooter is fun the first time around but after that no thanks.  PvP is a god awful joke of imbalance and flat out game breaking bugs.  

In essence SWTOR has everything other MMOs have except that SWTOR does it worse or at best the same as the others, and their fabled 4th pillar crumbles too early into the games life to mean anything significant to anyone.

Legacy, BTW is a hollow system built to promote alt rolling and offers almost nothing to anyone who doesn't want to grind to death to achieve a little perk or non combat emote.  To have yet another development patch be centered around this crap system is a total let down to anyone hoping something would happen in this game.

Well, so much for that.  Thank god for Skyrim and GW2 and TSW frankly.

I love how everybody goes like "oooh, EA has fired just about everybody on SWTOR, yeah, just confirms that SWTOR sucks and that EA is just a stupid joke in itself!"

As of right now we have not seen an offical BW or EA statement giving exact numbers!

So that "huge number" of layoffs could turn out to be just 100 guys.

Which one could argue may still be a large number. But what if it's 45 CSRs in the US and 45 CSRs in the EU? How are being let go for potentially a number of reasons including the fact that the Xmas rush is now over and the number of CSR that are required for efficient opperation can be cut by 50%?

Frankly, we are all guessing... except of course about Stephen Reid who has confirmed that he was laid off.

Which may well be considered a sound professional choice.

I mean seriously, would you really leave a guy who only can give 75% at best in his position (and I'm not looking at SR here, just speaking in general) if you can give the same responsibility to a guy who has prooven that he can give 110%?

And yes, there is also the fact that the future course of SWTOR may come into play: 1.2 offered new content, 1.3 doesn't...

IF BW were to re-foucus the devellopment of SWTOR rather on features (as so many people had been crying for) over new content (which was also an issue for other people), it's a bit like having a load of buckets filled with water at hand when the weather has just changed from dry season to wet season: you very likely don't need them! Them obviously being a full content provider team. ;-)

Let's wait and see...

"restructuring... As many have mentioned, this sort of thing is par for the course after a major MMO launch."

Par for the course for failing MMOs!

Cutting loose your cm that is major, so one has to wonder what devs got it in the process.

Now lets talk about group finder.  Until they fix the sever population problems group finder is not going to do you any good. It is a well known fact that they only have one sever hitting heavy (fatmam) 8 severs hitting standard, and the rest are ghostowns.

Dont believe me go look at this link. http://www.torstatus.net/

the game is in a death spiral, this comming from a once swtor fanboy.

i can't wait to play this as free2play... :3

Originally posted by Trol1

I love how everybody goes like "oooh, EA has fired just about everybody on SWTOR, yeah, just confirms that SWTOR sucks and that EA is just a stupid joke in itself!"

As of right now we have not seen an offical BW or EA statement giving exact numbers!

So that "huge number" of layoffs could turn out to be just 100 guys.

Which one could argue may still be a large number. But what if it's 45 CSRs in the US and 45 CSRs in the EU? How are being let go for potentially a number of reasons including the fact that the Xmas rush is now over and the number of CSR that are required for efficient opperation can be cut by 50%?

Frankly, we are all guessing... except of course about Stephen Reid who has confirmed that he was laid off.

Which may well be considered a sound professional choice.

I mean seriously, would you really leave a guy who only can give 75% at best in his position (and I'm not looking at SR here, just speaking in general) if you can give the same responsibility to a guy who has prooven that he can give 110%?

And yes, there is also the fact that the future course of SWTOR may come into play: 1.2 offered new content, 1.3 doesn't...

IF BW were to re-foucus the devellopment of SWTOR rather on features (as so many people had been crying for) over new content (which was also an issue for other people), it's a bit like having a load of buckets filled with water at hand when the weather has just changed from dry season to wet season: you very likely don't need them! Them obviously being a full content provider team. ;-)

Let's wait and see...

Did you even read? Did you even checked out the Twitter links?

At least 200 people have been laid off!  That's a lot!

It just means EA is cutting their losses with this game (just like they did with Warhammer Online when they axed almost the entire Mythic studio) and put the game in maintenance mode.

Patch 1.3 is already a perfect example of a typical "maintenance" mode patch. No real substance.

Did we hear anything about Ilum anymore?  Nope!

Did we hear anything about ranked warzones anymore? Nope!

Did we hear anything concrete about new planets that were about to be added? Nope!

And also when the Community Manager gets laid off.... that is exactly another example how EA operates.  They don't give a feck about their customers. So no more communication on the official forums.

So people can from now on rant and complain all they want on the forums... it's all gonna be for show from now on.  Like they listened anyway lol. So I guess not much difference there.

So... 200 odd layoffs apparently. Any idea of what the initial “team” size was?

It’s hard to gauge it when you don’t know the exact numbers (and when you know very little about MMO development,) but 200+ sounds pretty devastating for the future of the game, to say the very least.

200 folks let go.  We had 200 folks and they could not even give us a quality update with 1.2, much less this fluff we are getting for 1.3

And folks expect the game to get better?  All of us see this for what it is warhammer all over and maintenance mode at 6 months.

I have no idea who lost their jobs at BW, but I suspect it was not those that BW considers part of the Core Development Team. Those that lost their jobs were most likely the ones that wrote the code, designed the art, composed the music, or wrote the story and text used by the game. The modern trend in development is that Managers are considered Core Team members. This group is clueless when it comes to design requirements, details, and technical issues.  They are unable to Produce the product.  They have expectations and that is all that matters in today's development environment.

The temporary wage slaves that concern themselves with how the product is made, are considered disposable, and always are disposed of.

Originally posted by sbarra1x

So... 200 odd layoffs apparently. Any idea of what the initial “team” size was?

It’s hard to gauge it when you don’t know the exact numbers (and when you know very little about MMO development,) but 200+ sounds pretty devastating for the future of the game, to say the very least.

800

http://www.gamezone.com/products/star-wars-the-old-republic/news/new-estimates-suggest-swtor-development-cost-200-million