Hello everyone, welcome to this weeks edition of letters from the team! I have two major passions in my life, sleeping, and eating Buffalo Chicken Wings; from time to time I will wake up and/or run out of wings, when such a disaster strikes I usually go to work. My name is Matthew Higby, and I’m the SOE Lead-QA Tester’s for SWG! …How it all started… A long time ago… in, uh… Florida, there lived an idealistic youth. He was full of life, the very energy of life flowed through him like a vast river, and he embraced every moment with the reckless abandon that could only be captured by one so intoxicated with the possibilities of the future. Somewhere along the line reality stepped in, as it so often does, and re-routed the river… …Or dammed the river… …Or vaporized the river… …The point is; expectations change. Before too long the boy realized that while it was a great deal of fun to waste away the days in front of the television playing Final Fantasy, that eventually some sort of way to procure more “money” would need to be found. The more time passes, the less opportunities pop up, and at the very first possibility I dove off the “lazy-kid-train” and jumped head long into the “adult-world-of-responsibilities,-hardships-and-disappointments”. It was to this end that in the spring of 2001 I found myself driving cross-country from Florida to California to pursue a job in the Quality Assurance department of Sony Online Entertainment. …Where is this all going...? Two years and several expectations later, I find myself right where I want to be, working on a project and with a team that constantly challenges me. My job as a QA-Lead means that I act, more or less, as a magnifying glass; I try to harness a vast resource of energy and focus it towards a specific point. Right now we are working on testing all the various systems that go into a game of this scale - make no mistakes, it is a daunting task. I imagine that just as much thought and detail goes into each and every individual system in this game as would go into the creation of any other game; a commensurate attention to detail goes into the testing of each of the systems. It is a lot of work, a lot of frustration, and a lot of fun. …What makes me come into work every morning… Yes, it’s incredible to work on video games for a living, and a lot of the time it doesn’t really seem like “work time” so much as “play time”. Above all else however, the best thing about my job is the people I get to work with. Over the past few months I’ve had the pleasure to work not only with my QA team in San Diego, but also with the teams at SOE-Austin and LucasArts. It has been an amazing experience to work with such a passionate and dedicated group of people. I hope that in due course each of them will get their chance to introduce themselves to you, and let you all get to know them, it’s a fascinating and eclectic group of people. I couldn’t imagine a better-qualified or better-suited team to be testing this game. …So long… Thanks for reading! I hope that some part of this has given you an understanding of what goes into testing games like SWG. In a couple months I hope to see that we’ve done a spectacular job, and that this game meets all our expectations. See you around! Matthew M. Higby Lead-QA Tester Sony Online Entertainment