Welcome to a new series here at the Cantina called the Story Behind the Story. I’ll be going behind the scenes of the articles I write for Force Junkies and chronicling the inspiration and challenges that go into writing them.
This first edition is on my Guild Headquarters article – Where are the tools? The inspiration for this article came simply from the playing the game and trying to run my guild. It became apparent early on that the in-game communications tools for running a guild were wholly inadequate for the task. Now that things are starting to shift towards the end-game, and organization and communication are becoming more important, I wanted to write an article about the current state of the in-game guild tools.
The tone of the article was a little more negative than what I’d written previously and as you can imagine, it attracted quite a few comments, and not everyone was please that I was criticizing the game. It’s to be expected, however, I was hoping to see a few people actual agree that the guild tools need work.
Many of the comments were along the lines of the game is only a month old and we need patient, or if you don’t like it go back to WoW, or it took WoW seven years to implement everything.
While it’s true WoW didn’t have these features out of the gate, they do have them now, and there are a lot of people who played WoW and are used to having them. Like it or not, many people view SWTOR as a “next generation” MMO. By that I mean I think there is an expectation that it will have all of the awesome features of other MMOs and none of the bad features; it may reach that point someday, but there are a lot of miles to go.
While I pointed out some of the features that aren’t in game, my big issues are with the state of the ones that are in the game. As I mention in the article the Guild Description, MoTD, and Guild Roster are buggy or missing handy features that are found elsewhere in the game. I don’t know where they are on BioWare’s priority list, but I hope they’re higher than lower.
Since writing the article, BioWare announced that will be hosting a Guild Summit in March. I’m hoping that I’ll get invited to attend, as it’s something I’d love to participate in. Even if I don’t go, I find it very encouraging that BioWare considers guilds important enough to meet with them face to face. I suspect we’ll see a number of guild improvements in the big March content patch.
May the Force Be With You!
