communty-manager
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Hyperspace Beacon: SWTOR and the transparency dilemma
This past week on The Republic, I talked to prominent community members about transparency and broken promises in regard to Star Wars: The Old Republic. Both Heather from Corellian Run Radio and Redna from Ootinicast agreed that BioWare's community team has communicated too little and too infrequently with the players and has actually driven people away from the game because of that lack of dialogue. Also this past week, former Operative Class Representative Snave interviewed Community Manager Eric Musco, asking why the community team has been so quiet as of late and why it promised to deliver information by the end of September but it didn't. Snave also asked why there hasn't been more transparency from community team, especially when Musco specifically said that one of the things that he wanted from the community team was more transparency. Snave accused Musco of speaking out of both sides of his mouth when he said that he wanted more transparency but then wouldn't reveal what was going on with the announcement. Compounding recent events was a kerfuffle over the ongoing Cantina Tours. Players became upset when the Cantina Tour date for Las Vegas was moved from November 7th to November 15th, even though back in February, Community Coordinator Courtney Woods posted the planned dates of the Community Cantina Tour with the caveat that they were "subject to change." As a community, SWTOR players don't seem to be happy with or without transparency. The SWTOR community team cannot, as the saying goes, win for losing. What is the solution here? Let's discuss the details and maybe a solution or two.
Bashiok returns to the WoW team
Bashiok, who went by Drysc back in the day, has returned to the WoW community management team. He used to be on on the Diablo III CM team. He also notes that in a later tweet that he's been back on the WoW team since before MoP's launch, but that now it's just official. It's important not to read into this news at all in terms of the greater context of D3 or WoW, both games appear to be doing fine, and any negativity would not start or be first seen at the community manager level. Additionally, all the community managers deal with all the games, so for those of us that pay attention to who's staffed where, these distinctions mean very little. Now that I'm officially back on the WoW team... the Drysc avatar is coming back! Going to keep Bashiok though, cause followers. ;) - Bashiok (@Bashiok) January 3, 2013 Welcome back, Bashi-drysc!
