Dev Blog - Community Improvements - 3/29/18

CG_Erik
30 posts EA Administrator
edited March 2018
Intro
Although Carrie introduced me and my role at the recent Live Q&A, I’m probably still a newish face to most of you on the forums. It’s been great getting to talk with a number of you over the last few weeks, and I’m encouraged by the response to our latest efforts to be more transparent.
There have been a number of things that we’ve not nailed perfectly over time, however it is my hope that as we focus on improving our execution and communication, and as we engage with transparency, you will get a sense of the great love and passion our developers have for this game and how much heart and soul they pour into the development of SWGOH.
As the Player Lifecycle Producer at Capital Games, a lot of my day-to-day is working with the game studio and a wide-variety of teams at EA to figure out how to understand players at different points in their game experience (what we call “lifecycle”) and ensure we are addressing their needs. This means balancing between things intended for elder players and new players, free-to-play players and whales, and everything in between. I am also picking up some responsibilities that pertain to the community, as leveraging your opinions and feedback is one of the ways in which we prioritize these decisions.
I wear a lot of different hats each day, so, it’s kinda appropriate that today’s blog is a grab-bag of different topics…

On Going Communications, Dev Blogs & Q&As
While these communications are necessary and we’re overindexing on them right now in response to the lack of sufficient communication for awhile, the number of communications we are doing this week is not maintainable longterm (especially as we are looking to hire a Community Manager. If you are interested in or know anyone qualified for this position, check it out here.
We learned a tremendous amount from the last Q&A, even though it was on short notice and not at the most convenient time. We want to make sure we grow sustainably and not overcommit, but we’re currently considering doing a monthly Q&A, as long as it continues to be mutually useful.
We are constantly asked to share what game development looks like behind the scenes (beyond a lot of typing and meetings). To that end, we’re exploring ideas such as video developer diaries, interviews, b-roll. We’d love to hear more about what you’re interested in seeing in the thread linked below.

In-game Feedback Surveys
Each month we run a Customer Satisfaction survey which helps us gather feedback about how we’re doing as a game team, identify areas of improvement, get a general pulse on the health of the community sentiment, and whether we’re trending up or down since the last month. These surveys are an incredibly helpful, and statistically significant, tool for the team. They are sent to a random sampling of players who meet different criteria based on the status of their in-game account, how often they play, and other meaningful data. Oftentimes, the feedback from these surveys has a direct impact on what we prioritize for the team to build or improvement next, so if you’re one of the lucky ones to be randomly selected, make sure you take the opportunity to fill these surveys out when you see them.
In addition to the monthly CSATs that go to only a sampling of players, we would like to run a survey for everyone to take. Look for an in-game pop-up starting tomorrow and let us know what you love and what we can do better.

Game Changers
I’m personally really excited to be working more closely with our partners in the EA Game Changers program since a number of them came to Sacramento in February. We’re cooking up a number of different initiatives to bring the Game Changers in earlier to learn about our upcoming content as well as figuring out better ways to highlight the great content they produce. Better informed Game Changers can lead only to more informative and insightful content. Stay tuned for a series of Q&A videos with Carrie and the Game Changers to answer many of the rest of the questions we weren’t able to cover the night of the previous Q&A.

Beta Program
Last November, we ran a Beta program a few weeks prior to our release of Territory Wars that over 14,000 players participated in. The exercise was invaluable to the team and helped us identify a number of potential issues that we were able to address prior to release, as well as ensure our servers were stable, tuning was working as intended and much more.
We’d like to expand the number of participants in the Beta program for future releases. If you’d like to participate in a future Beta, please follow the link below and submit your Forum username. We can’t guarantee that everyone can participate every time. However, if you don’t get to participate in the next Beta, you’ll have a higher likelihood to be selected in the next one.
Click here to request access to the Beta Program

Thank you all for actively participating in this conversation. Let me know what you think about the changes, and I look forward to seeing you in the forums and on the Holotables.

Erik

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