My BioWare adventure!

So, as a few of you may know, I am now working for BioWare on SW:ToR. I just got all my toons moved and renamed, so I can finally talk a little bit about what I do publicly. If anyone is interested read on, if you are not interested then phooey on you.

So up front lets get the fun stuff out of the way:

No I will not give out information that I am not supposed to. If it isn't in a press release or on the website, good chance I cannot talk about it in an official capacity. I can speculate and make guesses just like everyone else though, and if you see me say something be sure to realize it is just me, not BioWare saying it, or a direct inclination of BioWare and their inner workings. I just simply wont answer or participate in a conversation if there is no way for me to not break the NDA.

I do still play live but I probably wont let anyone know what server/who they are for obvious reason. There are exceptions but I have to be careful because if it becomes a problem ingame I will have to uproot and move servers again.

While I am not part of the design team, I do have direct access to them. Please do not blast me with "YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GET BIOWARE TO PUT <insert feature> IN THE GAME". The best channel for that stuff is the suggestion forum on the website, then shoot me a PM with the link, and then I can poke my friends internally(pun sorta intended) and say, hey take a look at this. Chances are they have either thought about it already and are/are not planning on it, or they will just poke me in the eye and place it on the plate of stuff to look at. The upcoming features and patches are thought out and drawn up far in advance (i.e. 1.3 is coming out soon, 1.4 is in testing stage, and 1.5 is being finalized design wise... this is an example, not the exact state of things.) Don't get mad if you beg me for a feature and 2 months later it isn't in game.

I am on the QA End Game Team

Pretty much any and all content that comes out from here on until I am fired for excessive nudity I will be testing. Flashpoints, Operations, Features, Zones, Quest... everything. Being a game tester is a great job, but not as glamorous as the movie Grandma's Boy made it seem. Lots of paperwork, reading, investigating bug reports, documenting, reproducing results, frapsing, retesting, and killing coworkers while they aren't looking. It was pretty cool going onto the forums and seeing a player post about a problem, and then 3 hours later it was sitting in our queue for investigation. Felt good to know that things on the forum are actually making it to the right people even if there isn't official acknowledgement.

Someone on the team has the same name as me, so I have been dubbed Batman, and am being called that by everyone. Designers, Producers, Testers, Animators... everyone.

The day to day is pretty mundane. They bring in breakfast every day for us, and the fridges are stocked with free food. There is ice cream in several freezers for us. On Wednesday they whip out a movie theater style popcorn maker and put out a candy buffet for us. Friday is doughnut day. There is 16 people on my team, and 1 person overseeing the entire daily workflow. Four teams of 4, so we can break up and do flashpoints, 8 mans, or 16 man content very quickly. Testing operations and flashpoints is fun, the group quest and daily zones are by far my favorite though. They are less structured and give us freedom to complete our task how we see fit while looking for bugs exploits and investigating known issues and verifying fixes.

I put in a request to IT to get approval to multibox on my PC's at work, and have put in a request to my higher ups to ask to actually box content and provide feedback from a boxing point of view. IT should have no issue, only issue I could see is using ISBoxer as a tool and having them be worried Lax is going to sue their pants off or the IS or ISB builds not working with the different client builds. I have several PC's at my desk though so I can always just hardware box it. I will talk to Lax I suppose when that time comes.

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All in all it is a great job, even if the pay isn't epic. It pays more than minimum wage, and overtime is pretty abundant. Apparently they hire quite often too, so if you are interested let me know and I can inform you of when the openings show up. (the recent downsizing was not due to game performance, but trimming the launch preparation hiring boom mostly). If anyone has any questions about the job, company or SWTOR in general post them below and I will do my best to answer. 1.3 is coming out real soon and the group finder is gonna be pretty awesome, the new companion character is cool and can take some time to get.

And if anyone is ever in Austin, and would like to see the BioWare offices hit me up. No guarentees but with enough notice it can be arranged. Pretty damn awesome office lol.

I wouldn't mind a tour one of these days. Congratulations on your new job!

Congrats Crum! I'll hit you up if I'm in Austin. I may be at SXSW next year.

Congrats Crum! That is very cool!
I started off in games myself (Interplay, Sony Imagesoft and then Disney Interactive before leaving for Microsoft).
I started off in test and transitioned into Design/Dev. It was a very fun environment, pretty much just like you described.

And yes I am thinking there will be plenty of overtime hours for you. There was never a shortage of those from what I remember.