SWToRStrategies.com had the opportunity to attend Bioware’s SWToR Cantina Tour at Seattle’s Grand Hyatt hotel yesterday (Aug.31,2014) and bring you the latest information from the meeting.
SWToR community manager Eric Musco addressing the crowd at the beginning of the event
The event was well-organized with free food and drinks, that certainly contributed to the already-relaxed atmosphere for the (about)100 fans who attended it. SWToR’s community manager, Eric Musco, made the introductions and highlighted the importance of Cantina Tours to Bioware as a vehicle for them to receive feedback on the game.
The Q&A session offered some interesting information about the upcoming Bioware updates.
In detail:
- Next expansion is set to be released by the end of the year. A date wasn’t provided.
- Bioware is aware of the conquest system challenges that benefit large multi-member guilds. The team is actively looking into alternatives that would benefit smaller guilds that don’t necessarily have the numbers. There is no timeline for the enhancements to the system.
- A button for deploying a random mount from your character’s collection is in work.
- Bioware hasn’t considered a (web-based) global guild leaderboard but it was a feature that was requested by some Cantina tour attendees.
- The team is aware of the Harbinger server issues and is working on rectifying them.
The session also included a trivia question session where Bioware representatives asked random SWToR questions from the audience and gave out prizes to the winners. Prizes included SWToR t-shirts, Star Wars Lego sets, while the grand prize was the book of Sith holocron. It’s worth mentioning that the grand prize was won by a participant who traveled all the way from Australia to attend the tour. Fans also attended from Europe and Asia.
Following the Q&A session, developers and community coordinators had the chance to talk to fans in smaller group settings. We managed to talk to Eric Musco, community coordinator Courtney Woods and lead producer Cory Butler. Some of the highlights of our discussion included:
- Guild spotlight featured articles are in work but the team hasn’t made a firm decision on the path forward.
- Raising the guild member cap to over 500 members is something that has been discussed over the last couple of months at Bioware. At the same time, server performance concerns prevent that from happening soon until an viable solution is identified.
- Bioware is always seeking out SWToR fansites and wants to interact with them as an alternate way of getting feedback.
Last but not least, the team distributed codes for an in-game M8-3R astromech droid and the famous USB drives revealing upcoming content releases. The USB drive contents are covered separately under this post.
Overall, the Cantina Tour was well-organized, well-attended and above all fun! Bioware representatives spent a lot time with fans, answered questions, while actively seeking feedback. If you never attended a Cantina tour and you play SWToR, check out the schedule posted at swtor.com for upcoming events- it’s definitely worth a trip.
