SWTOR and EA's Play To Give

This weekend SWTOR players had the chance to take part in EA's Play To Give event. Here's its official page, but if you can't be bothered to click, it's basically EA pledging to donate money to three different charities supporting inclusivity: one dedicated to promoting gender equality and two anti-bullying charities. Because being inclusive means interacting with other people, you could also earn in-game rewards in several of EA's multiplayer games over the weekend, SWTOR being one of them.

Looking at the coverage of this event once again served to highlight that Dulfy really might as well get rid of her comment section, considering what a wretched hive of scum and villainy it has become - the comments in response to her post about the event were filled with people complaining about the "evil SJW-ness" of it all, with some of them even pledging to not play this weekend because they didn't want to support such horrible causes. Yeah, really.

Anyway, I'm generally in favour of businesses giving to charity, though I suspect that it's going to take a lot more than that for a company that was voted "worst in America" twice to improve its image. (Not that I personally think that particular award was justified. This post sums it up well I think.)

However, I also found it interesting to see SWTOR featured in this line-up just because EA generally hasn't really been very proud of the game or happy to mention it anywhere at all for quite some time, so them actually bothering to give it this sort of cross-promotion was good to see. With the event being focused on playing with other people, seeing SWTOR make a point of promoting just that was also yet another sign of Bioware's dramatic shift in focus back to the game's MMO parts. I wonder if Keith had a hand in getting SWTOR on this event's featured games list too?

All that said, I have to admit that I found the event's actual implementation somewhat lacklustre. Announcing it literally only one day in advance was too short of a notice to allow the community to generate much buzz. Also, the connection between the charitable cause and the games was just too tenuous. Yes, "having a good time with lots of different people" was a theme but that was literally it. They could have made it a lot more interactive by for example having "stretch goals" of sorts, pledging to increase their donation if people hit the presented gaming goals instead of just tying them to in-game rewards.

Finally, there was literally no sign of it in game or on the website other than the news article, meaning that many people still probably didn't even know about it, but even those who did had no way of tracking what was going on. I initially went into the weekend with a bit of a plan to devote extra time to SWTOR, but in the end my enthusiasm quickly fizzled out simply because I didn't know if what I was doing was "working". It would have been great to have some sort of live tracker to show how close people were to hitting the goal of one million group content runs completed, to encourage everyone to give it that extra push if needed. With no feedback whatsoever, there simply wasn't much incentive to try harder.

We'll find out on Tuesday/Wednesday whether we succeeded - but to be honest, since we never saw any numbers, Bioware could just say "good job", pat us on the head and give us the rewards anyway. It's not like we'd know.