FAQ:  Why don’t we see more Developers posting in our Forum?

I want to begin by saying that the Developers would have liked to be in a position to read through our forums more often, and post in them frequently, as they know that good communication is critical to progress.  When these forums were first started, that is what they attempted to do.  Therefore, you would occasionally see posts form Developers scattered throughout the various Profession Forums.  However, there were some limitations preventing this from being very effective or practical.

For one, there are currently over 30 different SWG Professions, with each having its own forum.  On top of that there are a multitude of galaxies/servers, each having two forums (normal and trade) associated with it.  Add to that the dozen or so other miscellaneous forums for announcements, development, etc.  This tallies up to around 100 distinct different forums; each having hundreds of threads with tens of posts or more.  It would be a monumental task to try and keep up to date on all of the forums even if there were twice the number of Developers that there currently are.

Second, if the Developers plan on getting any “developing” done, they can’t spent 100% of their available work time surfing the forums.  Therefore some of their time must be allocated to trying to keep up with the forums, but the majority of it needs to be in making things happen.  They also still wanted to be able to personally keep up with certain public forums, such as Development, so some measure of a balance had to be established.

The solution the Developers came up with was to appoint a member of each profession forum to serve as a representative of that profession.  This representative, titled a “Correspondent”, basically becomes the Developer’s liaison to all the members of the profession via the Profession Forum, and the Player’s liaison to all the developers via a number of mediums, including a special Correspondent Forum.  This provides the developers with a condensed and filtered version of the information gathered from each of the 30+ Profession Forums, all in one easy to locate place.

With this program in place, you will only very rarely see anything posted directly by a Developer (Red Name) in a Profession Forum.  Any information the Developers decide to make public to a particular Profession will instead be posted through their representatives, the Correspondents (Blue name).  This process has effectively leveraged the Developers' time, allowing them to get back to… well… developing.