Interview with the SWTOR Community Manager Eric Musco by Central Network

Sam from the Central Network channel has interview the SWTOR Community Manager Eric Musco!

Skip ahead to 8:30 minutes in for the interview.

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The below is not a transcript of the interview, just some notes, so make sure to watch the full interview for the full answers and questions!!!

What do you hope for your professional future?

“I love it, I don’t plan on going anywhere. I wish that each and every person who played the game got to meet each and every person who works on the game. Couldn’t ask for a better job.”

New Classes?

Musco mentions that adding new classes are a really big deal – you have a super long class story, inherent to you and what you’re playing, and to do another one of those, and do it justice would be very unlikely. They absolutely know that players want to have more cutomization and do more with the existing classes.

Weapons in outfit designer?

“We still have a very large interest in doing it, and it goes back to giving as much customization as possible. The reason it hasn’t happened is that it’s not a small thing to do, even though it seems like it would be with the armor / outfit designer, it’s a pretty large feature which is why it hasn’t happened yet. It still gets talked about internally a lot but they need to decided when to work it in to the schedule.”

The main issues seems to be resources / time. It’s not that they have partially built the weapons designer and ran in to bugs or issues, its simply that they know the large scope of the work and have not yet found the time.

Can you tell us, or give us an example of your reach on star wars material within the canon and non canon universes?Or are Bioware restricted in what material they can “play” with?

“We kinda have freedom to do what we want.” The team is huge fans of Star Wars and they want things to make sense in the Star Wars timefame. For example they just put out a blog post about the items inspired by The Mandalorian, you won’t see a 1-to-1 copy of armors or items.

Were there any restrictions on adding Revan to the game?

There isn’t a rule book that is handed to us.
We are precious that the things we do make sense. Lucas is a collaborative partner with us. How can we get Revan in there in a way that makes sense? We have a lot of freedom.” They do backtrack when they have ideas that later don’t make sense. Lots of collaboration.

We don’t necessarily shy away from references. Charles the Creative Director likes to reference obscure Star Wars lore like Tales of the Jedi.

Class changes?

Onslaught was a place where we looked at changing suystematically how we handle class changes. Set bonuses used to be number-affecting, but the classes didn’t change a lot. The idea was to push that more in to gear so you could modify it through itemization. They talk about it but want to make sure they are carefull with any large changes.

Will there be massive changes to classes?

Musco asks, do you actually want it to change? If so, to what degree? Would you be ok if you started an expansion and your class was totally different?

Have you considered changing up endgame rewards to always be greater compared to bolstered content? (ex level 70 and level 75 give the same rewards, and level 70 can sometimes even out perform level 75)

Yes. We are super sensitive to the effects of bolster with two competing goals. Inexperienced / ungeared players, we don’t want to lock them out of content, so we need to give them some help via bolster, on the flip side, experieced players need a reason to do the content. Gearing up your character is a big deal, so if your gear doesn’t matter, “something” needs to. PvP is another part we discuss – if we bolster you up all the way, there’s no gear to chase, but is gear the reason PvPers enjoy PvP? Or is the competition? A balance between feeling rewarded and not being locked out of content. Expansions are where we touch this the most and where player feedback is very important.

The Onslaught system adjusts to you. A not very skilled and undergeared player will still get some basic gear upgrades. A geared player will get better upgraded gear.

Desync in PvP and what is the progress on fixing it?

There’s a couple pieces to it.

Desync is not a single issue. There’s not a magic bullet to solve on singular problem. For example, lag is similar, in that it is referred to for many different things. Desync is referred to be players when there’s a wierd mismatch between the player and the server, like when you leap to a player and it doesn’t line up. There will never be a patch note that says “Desync is fixed” as a bullet point. We don’t usually communicate that we’ve made performance better, but the team is often making changes to increase performance in the game, that player may not have even recognized is there. The dream is maybe two years from now, and no one even asks about desync or remembers that it’s a problem, and its what Musco expects to eventually happen. There are cases for specific issues like “I used force charge and fell off the railing”, then they can sometimes find a very specific symptom, fix it, and communicate that fix.

We literally disabled some warzones due to performance, and when we do turn them back on that’s an indication that we’ve improved performance.

F2P / Preferred upgrades? Operation passes?

“I am not aware of the population changed in operations after removing passes.” (Not that it didn’t happen, just that he’s not aware.) They discuss passes internally. It changed because gaining gear changed in KOTET, and you no longer could gain gear as a non-sub, so a operation pass would be not useful as you could not get any gear from the operation. We are now in a different system, so the passes would be more viable in this system. In Onslaught, we made more F2P / Preferred changes. We still beleive there are problems in our free to play model, some are not quick fixes to make, and we have a desire to increase things there, but the problem that would be attempted to be fixed, is players who are not subscribed want a way to play operations. The team has to ask, is ops passes the best method to fix that problem? What if it was you could be a subscriber for a day, a subscriber for a day pass? It isn’t as simple as just bringing back the passes. If you wanted to get a pass for a friend, maybe a better solution might be the ability to buy and gift a sub to a friend.

List of things they are working on from a former devstream?

The list Chris provided during the past dev stream are still the things we want to update.

– Conquest (done)
– PvP Rewards (ongoing)
– Crafting (no changes yet except new augments)
– World Changes
– Amplifiers

Rendering mentioned in the last dev stream?

It’s never a sure thing of Keith is trolling, telling the truth, and Eric Musco does not know. “It’s possible” Musco knows but won’t tell us anything. “Who knows what Keith is going to do on stage” during live events with announcements. “You have no idea what Keith is randomly going to tell you in a cantina”. Going in to the live interviews you never know what he’s going to say. During the livestream Keith photoshops a pink lightsaber in to the picture for the female Jedi Knight and the newer Community team member was so surprised. “Keith knows exactly what he’s doing.”

Ok so at the end of the #SWTOR livestream they made some jokes about what they would not talk about for next year. Keith said some things but they were hard to hear. I think he said he will "not" tell you about…

– Expanding
– Structure changes
– Changes that affect rendering pic.twitter.com/LKOP5TjKGB

— Swtorista (@swtorista) November 21, 2020

Performance – you guys use a “Flash Player sort of software for the user interface in the game” and this could be highly related to stutter, frame drops, lag. Is that true?

Musco says he’s pretty sure that’s not a factual statement. Does our game have perfect performance? Of course not. Performance issues are almost always multi-layered.

In a previous stream, you mentioned KPI reports, are your goals, your targets. Can you give us an example of what your KPIs might look like, and how often do you meet them and how does it effect your content schedule? and How well as swoop racing been received?

They’re tracking everything, not just how the business is doing. We put out goals for what we would expect – how many players will engage with Swoop, how many characters, how many people complete the event, how many rewards, etc. Swoop did well! A lot of people played it. Swoop is interesting as it wasn’t just get missions, fight stuff, complete missions, we went out of the box, and it was received rather well. We saw a lot of people playing it.

The original info: Keith Kanneg, Game Director, also went on vacation for a bit. Works behind the scenes with people on screen, EA leadership, work to get funding, behind the scenes KPI looking at the business make sure it is healthy, does a lot of stuff people don’t know about.

When we’re doing something so far outside the box (Feast) its going to be polarizing. It’s expected.

Strongholds?

We are always looking for new opportunities for strongholds. Team loves them.

Why don’t we have Valkorian’s armor in the game yet?

Characters like Valkorian are a custom build, the whole character is a single model. You can’t just pull his armor off. We’ve practically have to build it seperately. So why hasn’t that happened? I thought I had an update, it still gets talked about, I’ll ask around.

With the 10th anniversary coming next year it would be the perfect time for Hasbro to rerelease the past SWTOR action figures or even release new ones. Have you had any contact with Hasbro about this?

We don’t contact Hasbro. We don’t handle products. Lucas does. We too also acknowledge numerous times that next year is our 10th anniverary and we want to pull out every bell and whistle possible.

Do you know where the story is going, or does the team know where the story is going after valkorian is gone for good?

Yes we do. (Next question!)

I am very exciting about what’s coming in 6.2, but I’m also very excited about what’s coming. I think you will be too.

On loading toon’s screen can we hover + see some stuff like conquest points, skills for example?

We have talked about that as an expanded feature often. What if there were icons for crew skills or conquest for the week? Definitely talked about, improving the useability of the character select. Nothing planned, but discussed.

Do you plan to continue the return to the dual faction style of story-telling going forward? Perhaps including story updates between large expansions?

I can’t answer without spoilers.

When can we expect the release date for 6.2? Or when can we expect an announcement about it?

Next week. Almost certainly. We typically wait for the PTS cycle to conclude.

Can we get new stances with the lightsaber example JK hold the lightsaber with 2 hands while the SW holds it with 1 hand maybe even hold it like starkiller (visual stances / grips)

It would be very challenging as we’d have to change every combat animation, don’t expect it anytime soon.

Can we look forward to seeing anymore Revan in the future??

Spoiler question, I can’t answer.

When are u going to optimize the game for AMD CPU’s there are a lot of cases of it running rly hot .Are u aware of this issue and if yes are u working on fixing it.

Interesting. Sam get that information to me. I would be surprised if the team didn’t know already.

Will we ever get a Kai Zykken operation boss?

Charles had talked o Kai Zykken as a literal playable companion for April Fools. Except he doesn’t do anything, all his abilities are just “barks” (voice bits).

Any plans for old comps returning as main characters ? like romance options like ashara risha etc

Musco talks about the fact that some companions can not return and makes it very unlikely, but others like Kira and Scourge become central to the story.

Thanks Sam for doing such a great interview! Check out some of the great lore videos he’s made below and visit his Youtube Channel for more videos and livestreams!