Tiefighter said

Hey guys hope you are all well and its not real world stuff that has slowed the site down.
But I suspect that its more likely the Ea/ Bioware stuff that has been going on.
I for one would like to hear your views on it and the future of the game and RT .
This is my Favorite site and would love to see it continue !
I also read TORWARS and Darth Hater every day , and the difference in how those two sites handled the news was light and day.
Jeff and his team tackled the issues head on and called it how they saw it (We are all worried how the game will look after the six month first up subs are over) The Darth Hater crew didn't post a news story about it and their pod cast was limp to say the least :(.
Fan sites shouldn't be press releases for good news only !

Hey Tiefighter,

Thanks for the post. Yes, obviously RT has slowed dramatically over the past month. This is due to several reasons.

1. Staffing – at one point we had close to 10 writers, on top of several other staff members for web / forum / social networking etc. Over the past three months ALL of those people have stopped playing the game. We are now down to our original 3 members: Myself, Dave, & Mike. Of the remaining three I have since cancelled my account and no longer play (not a huge deal, I was the primary web dev, so I can still do that job), Dave is still playing, but at a severly reduced rate, perhaps less than 2 hours a week right now. That just leaves Mike who is still actively playing, but as of yet not level 50.

2. Real life issues – a lot has happened / changed since RT went live last summer. People are getting married, moving across the country, looking for new jobs or getting promotions at day jobs that are eating into their time for RT.

3. EA / BioWare – to be honest, there is not a ton to really report on right now. We've never considered ourselves a "news" site so to speak – like a DH, TORWARS, or AskAJedi. Not to say we didn't cover news, but we've tried to keep things focused on the Trooper wherever possible. To be honest, there is not a lot of Trooper goodness out there that isn't already known by players. This is compounding the problem. Add to this that patch 1.3 is light on content again…and heavy on features…

All of this adds up to RT hitting a sever slow down. A post addressing the issue is coming soon, but Dave is in the middle of a relocation right now – so it will be a week or so. Mike is still working on some items as well, but probably only one or two a month – that was the committment we asked of all of our writers -one or two items a month.

In the end, the site is not going away, but yes its level of cotent and coverage is wanning due to the reasons listed above.

/salute

-A

So nice to hear we still have people wonder where the hell we are ;)

I am going to make Andy do another podcast if it kills me. Or he does. Not sure which would come first…

Yeah we've hit a lot of snags this month and I have to admit when our content slowed down I got real worried. Andy and I both work 9+ hour day jobs and Dave is in the midst of moving for the second time in a short bit. It's been hard.

To let you know what's going on in MY world… I'm currently devoting a good deal of time to my fiction as well. I'm a novelist and short story writer first and foremost, a game writer second. With SWTOR hitting huge at the beginning, I let my novel and other works slack off, and everytime I go a day without plugging away on my book? I see another day stuck in a cubicle.

I've been posting other fiction on my blog as well (miekkenr.wordpress.com). 36 Hours currently resides there, as does Beyond Measure. New Fan Fiction will be going up from me, but its not SWTOR… still Bioware though :) For those who liked my stuff, be sure to join my twitter. I do a LOT of that.

Oh, also, I'm getting married in November. So yeah, that's a bit of a time sink too ;)

I will be writing more RT stuff soon I promise. With the E3 annoucements this week, I'll be writing up my thoughts for sure. When I do, be sure to chime in! I miss you guys and like Andy said, RT isn't going anywhere.

Haha! Nice analogy!

My fiancee plays TOR too btw, she's a beta-to-day-1 trooper herself. Love at first Kolto Bomb…

Amen to that LR!

I'm still playing though writing and life has made gaming reduce to a few hours every other day. My blog is doing well, and people are reading my stuff so I'm very happy on that front.

I still have quite a few things to put down here at RT but LadyRepublic is right, everyone is having a downturn. It'll pick up again, so for you guys who stick with us, thank you. I'm working on some reviews of the E3 summit as we speak, just trying to digest it all first while getting up my Mass Effect story, my original Sci Fi story and keeping the novel pushing forward as well.

My fingers need some aspirin…

I agree with you on that. I think there's PLENTY more to be excited about in the future. This is just the 4-8 month quiet period that almost EVERY MMO has had. WoW included.

At 6 months, WoW didn't even have 1 million subscribers. TOR is over that, as far as I know and it's just beginning. More things are coming out and they're doing a lot of what they should: listening to players, doing the asked-for things correctly… though they move slowly. Bioware is a big company, with a lot of specialized teams. I think they move on things a heck of a lot slower than most companies and I'm not sure it's a bad thing.

The UI issue for one. I played Rift where the UI was able to be customized day one. SWTOR's UI program blew it out of the water. They create, test, re-test and then re-test again. It's how they do things.

As for RT's podcast… I'd love to do more of them. I'm a fan of podcasts (in fact I'll probably be doing one w/ Dimbo from Dimbo Trooper in the near future, talking about TOR Fiction). If I can prod Andy with a sharp enough stick maybe we can get a good podcast out of him yet ;)

Make no mistake. Andy is THE reason our podcast is amazing. He's a great host, is stellar at the audio and spends HOURS editing each and every cast. We record for about 1 hour and 20 minutes and he spends 4-7 hours over the next two days working on it. It blows my mind every time.

That said. I miss hearing my stupid comments on air.