Joveth has posted a “We’re going to start interacting again” message to the Star Wars the Old Republic official forums.. It reads quite similar in intent to the message he posted at the end of May. Â It’s a lengthy post, so it’s after the jump, along with some replies from the thread.
Hi everyone,
For those of you that don’t know, I’m Joveth Gonzalez, Community Manager for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™.
As most of you know, over the past few months, our team, our studio, and our game have undergone quite a few changes. Through it all, we’ve remained committed to the community and have worked with the development team to make sure that your voices were heard.
I wanted to take some time to reassure you all that my team, the community team, is still committed to you folks. As part of this commitment, we’re excited to let you know that we have been developing a brand new strategy for our team that focuses on developing new ways to bring you more information about the game and the people involved with SWTOR’s development.
As we progress towards the recently announced Free-to-Play experience, you can expect more frequent updates to the game (which means more information coming to you) and more developer interactions.
The Star Wars: The Old Republic community is large and spread across many outlets, but rest assured that our team is scouring the forums, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, fan sites, and anywhere that SWTOR is being discussed to make sure that we get your thoughts, comments, questions, and general feedback. Know that we are listening you, no matter where you choose to participate in the SWTOR community.
In the upcoming weeks, you’ll be seeing elements of our new community strategy as they appear on our site. One of our primary goals with this is to ensure that new information about the game is communicated as quickly and effectively as possible.
Last but not least, I will be re-introducing the rest of community team along with this new strategy. You may have already seen them here on the forums or on the website, but you will learn more about Allison Berryman, Eric Musco, Courtney Woods, Amber Green, Lars Malcharek, and Antonio Moreno.
We’re all excited about the future of this game and with the new focus on more frequent content updates and the introduction of the Free-to-Play experience, you can expect more communication opportunities overall.
If you have any questions, thoughts, or ideas, please feel free to send us an email at community@swtor.com. You can also send me a PM here on the forums or reach me on Twitter @joveth. These are three different ways for you to get in touch. We will limit important announcements to only occur on our site, forums, our Facebook page, and/or the official SWTOR Twitter account.
Thank you, sincerely, for participating and being a part of our community over the past few months. We look forward to hearing more from you in the future.
Joveth goes on to confirm they will still do interviews with both fan sites, and media:
Of course not! This just means that we will be sure to spread out our communication when WE have new information for you. This does not affect fan sites or any interviews conducted
After getting called out on the similarities between today’s message, and the one he posted on the 29th of May (someone compared him to the boy who cried wolf).. Joveth says:
I’m aware of my previous post. Circumstances have changed substantially since then and we are now in a position to deliver on the things I have outlined.
I’m going to comment here… The way this is written, means that the Community team had absolutely no ability, perhaps even intent, to live up to what Joveth committed to on the 29th of May. Â This is discouraging, it means that Joveth’s previous post was made, simply to ‘quiet the masses’ after a round of layoffs. Â Which then also leads me to doubt whether the Community team will be able to do what Joveth is saying they’ll do now.
There are a few more posts from Joveth in the thread, with no real information provided.. in fact, he refers people to the weekly Q&A to get any questions answered.
All in all, it’s what is hopefully, the first step on the path of repairing relations between the SWTOR team, and the community after all the changes/layoffs/etc. at BioWare Austin this year.