Star Wars: The Old Republic Meet and Greet Q&A

The guys over at Darth Hater are offering up a transcript of the questions posed to Star Wars: The Old Republic's Daniel Erickson and the answers he gave during the team's Eurogamer Expo meet and greet event. Here's a bit on social integration and achievements:
Question about Facebook/Twitter integration.

SR: That's been looked at. It's not going to happen for launch. I'm sorry, the question was, if anyone didn't hear it, "Are we going to link it to things like Facebook, Twitter, and that sort of thing." It's really being looked at very, very closely, as are things like mobile apps, and that sort of thing. Anything that connects outside of the game to inside of the game. But it's probably not going to be a launch feature.

DE: If you tweet to Stephen about what you're doing in game, he will retweet it out for you. So, uh..

SR: It's a manual retweet service. Now, I would actually say, me personally, I will fight with all of my heart to avoid us doing automatic tweeting based on achievements in the game.

DE: Or the...how to make everybody stop following you on Twitter.

SR: Yep. I did exactly that when everybody started playing a game that shipped last year.

Q: What about surnames?

SR: There's a very good reason we haven't discussed surnames yet, and that will be revealed before ship.

DE: Or not. Those are the only two possibilities.

SR: It's one or the other. I think it'll be revealed before ship. I'm hopeful.

Q: Will there be achievements in the game?

SR: There will not be achievements in game at ship, correct?

DE: Not correct.

SR: Not correct?!?

DE: Not correct. Achievements have made ship in fact. They're not going to be the achievements, the crazy achievements that you have to place everywhere, that are like, "Hey if you drink 6 beers and fart in a cantina," those are not going the achievements to go in. Version 1 of the achievement system which go in, which is actually doing big, heroic stuff, because there's a ton of great optional content in The Old Republic, like, "Hey, I went to every world and kicked the world boss's ass." Those kinds of achievements. That's going to be the level one system. People need reasons to go back to planets and run around and do that other stuff, so that will come second. The first system is, "Hey, here's my bragging rights, here's the bad ass stuff I did in-game."