Today on the TOROCast forum, it was rumored that Community Manager Sean Dahlberg had left BioWare. Members of the SWTOR community did believe it odd that he did not show up to PAX, which was supposed to be the biggest event of the year for SWTOR. He even tweeted to the Jedi Archive on Saturday: "Nope, I'm back in Austin but Brian is there! Granted, part of me wants to just drive there but I'd be late." That gave everyone the impression that he had a lot of work to do. However, today he updated his twitter page so that it no longer reflected his BioWare title nor a link to swtor.com.
Although there has yet to be word from Dahlberg himself, Joanne Laroche, the Senior Community Coordinator, recently posted this on the official Old Republic website: "Sean Dahlberg has recently left BioWare. We would like to thank Sean for doing a great job building the TOR Community and we wish him well in his future endeavors!" This confirms that Dahlberg has left BioWare, but it still does not answer why this has happened.
Massively will keep an eye on this story and on Dahlberg's personal site for new developments. Until then, we wish the best for Sean and for the game.
[Nice catch, "fo diddy" at TOROcast!]
Update: Sean posted on his personal blog and wanted to let everyone know that he did not fall off the end of the earth. As for what's next for Mr. Dahlberg, he had this to say, "What's in the next chapter in the life of Sean... well, that would be giving out information and we all know I don't do that. I'd say just kidding but I actually can't talk too much about that at this point. Soon™ but not yet."
Reader Comments (35)
Posted: Sep 7th 2010 6:05PM phobic99 said
Ruh roh...
Posted: Sep 7th 2010 6:13PM mattward1979 said
The forum post with the official news is going nuts over there... posts faster than the human eye can read!
Posted: Sep 7th 2010 6:16PM ChaosInc said
Bracing for the "this is the first sign of fail" spam...
Posted: Sep 7th 2010 6:37PM (Unverified) said
There has to be more than one person to leave/booted , before the begining "signs of fail" are there.
Otherwise there are many reasons possible.
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Otherwise there are many reasons possible.
Posted: Sep 7th 2010 7:51PM jeremy2020 said
Fail because a community manager quit? Oh noes, he can finally put his degree to good use at Burger King, I guess.
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Posted: Sep 7th 2010 6:28PM Graill440 said
Rest assured folks we will send out search parties.............and Sean, DO NOT go into the light!
Posted: Sep 7th 2010 6:34PM Minofan said
I hope this isn't in response to public feedback being more tempestuous of late, as I really doubt that is Sean's fault in any way.
More likely it's just down to community manager being a rather stressful and not-so-fun position at times - the turnover must be fairly rapid, I assume.
More likely it's just down to community manager being a rather stressful and not-so-fun position at times - the turnover must be fairly rapid, I assume.
Posted: Sep 7th 2010 6:37PM karnisov said
yeah its a thankless job. and i'm sure the space-on-rails reveal didn't make it any easier.
Posted: Sep 7th 2010 6:45PM Tethadam said
This happens all the time, he was just a glorified forum mod, Community Managers are a dime a dozen. I wish him luck in his future endeavorers but this will have zero impact on the game.
If anyone remembers the main CM for WoW quit just before the game launched...
Her name was Katricia, and she was the main voice for Blizzard on the beta forums. Yet her leaving did nothing to hurt the game.
If anyone remembers the main CM for WoW quit just before the game launched...
Her name was Katricia, and she was the main voice for Blizzard on the beta forums. Yet her leaving did nothing to hurt the game.
Posted: Sep 7th 2010 7:05PM Darkdust said
While I'm respectful of the work of a community manager, I'd worry more about a game that lost its lead designer.
Or that hired Tiggs, so watch that space.
Or that hired Tiggs, so watch that space.
Posted: Sep 7th 2010 7:20PM (Unverified) said
Tiggs is the only CM I've ever really liked. They could do much worse than to hire her.
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Posted: Sep 7th 2010 7:41PM Deadalon said
Bioware are really showing they are NOT doing so well with MMO games. Warhammer has been left to rot (yes its now Bioware game) and SWOTOR is going the same way with the key players of the team leaving (you will hear from this later) because of poor managment.
Again - Bioware is starting off nicey by killing WAR in the first year of taking over. THats a great sign of things to come! NOT
Again - Bioware is starting off nicey by killing WAR in the first year of taking over. THats a great sign of things to come! NOT
Posted: Sep 7th 2010 8:50PM Vrazule said
Your beef is with Electronic Arts. They call the shots for Warhammer Online. The Bioware / Mythic moniker merely reflects the combining of the developer teams under EA's umbrella. Not only that, but none of the Bioware people were moved over to WAR, but some of the WAR team were moved over to SWTOR. WAR's problem is that it has a bare bones team with very little support from EA who are famous for dropping the ball on failing games, especially MMOs.
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Posted: Sep 7th 2010 9:47PM (Unverified) said
I hope it's because he was the one that recommended Jedi Wizard, and when BW realized how awful it was, they fired him. In other words, I blame Jedi Wizard.
Posted: Sep 7th 2010 11:23PM (Unverified) said
imn the update he uses Soon with the tm this is a common use by WoW devs could this mean he's gone over to blizzard?
Posted: Sep 8th 2010 1:28AM (Unverified) said
Every developer in the world uses the "soon(tm)" when asked how long before a fix or something will be out, and have been doing so since way before Blizzard/WoW.
So I'm hoping your post was /sarcasm and my detector was just malfunctioning.
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So I'm hoping your post was /sarcasm and my detector was just malfunctioning.









