Regarding the Thousand Cuts and 3 Changes threads

Anyone who played MMORPG's over the last 15 years and had eyes knows that every other company has been better than this one at communicating - and there is no burden on me to prove that to you, because I don't care one iota how you feel about my argument.

Yes, communication has become more important in recent years, all the more reason to step it up slightly instead of falling into the dark ages.

MMO players, in general, seem to take a "board of directors" entitlement approach to the games.

By this I mean that they often behave like they are on the companies board and that everything they share warrants a direct and immediate response by the companies developer and support staff.

The flaw in this approach is that you are a consumer, with no NDA in place with the company, and therefore not eligible to receive any information that is not vetted for public disclosure. Much of what MMO companies (really all corporations these days) do in terms of incorporating customer feedback into a product is never directly disclosed back to the customer until it is ready for release to the public in the product. You don't have to like it, but that is the way it is in today's competitive markets. Everything is potential IP, which means they err on the side of caution. That is your free market capitalsim model in action. Whereas what MMO players want is open socialism in the context of MMO games. Not going to happen.

This is probably not something you should be proud of. There were 4? 5? max locked threads protesting 1.2 sorc / sage changes, with detailed and constructive write-ups from actual high-end raiding sorc/sage healers which were completely ignored in favor of what you described as "internal metrics". 6 months later, our sage healers still haven't seen any reversion and still run out of force in HM EC.

If you're actually compiling the data like you say, the devs seem to genuinely not care what you give them. Does that not give you any sort of pause about what you're doing or what you communicate to us?

Example - In 3 things you'd like to see changed about this game, person X asked for more options to customize your starship.

1) Do the devs like this idea - e.g. let us know you're working on x idea suggested by the players
2) How high of a priority is this idea (can be general), but is it something that will take weeks, months, or years, based on where it is ranked? I don't want to hear "we want to do this someday", too noncommittal. Is there or is there not a resource working on it.
3) What's the rough timetable for the implementation of this idea? Can be tentative, but 3 months, this year, this spring, are all nice things that give us something other than "soon" or "not any time soon" to look forward to.

Just because it was detailed, construction, and well thought-out doesn't make it right or ultimately good for the game. We all want to pay $0 in taxes and can think of myriads of well thought-out and detailed ways to not pay taxes and do other things to make up for the lack of income via taxes. However that does not mean it will work or be good for the country.

BJ

to expect the dev team to take time away from their duties to confer with the community team concerning every suggestion proffered and give a response such as the three-tiered one you suggest would be incredibly time-consuming and wasteful from a business perspective.

Im guessing that the devs have a boss right? That boss wants a timetable created and deadlines met (assuming he's running a tight ship which I would think EA would want) to make sure that he/she is paying employees for a reason.

Im also assuming that as a creative studio (making new content and ideas), they have weekly or bi-weekly meetings with at least the heads of each department (whom i would hope know whats going on in their department) At said time, they can take 20 minutes to create a newsletter for paying customers. Choosing a few great ideas a week or every 2 weeks to get answered more thoughtfully than the previous Q&A with better selection than the weekly Q&A since the questions asked were generally f'ing stupid questions like "i want a pink speeder!" Hell, they can even pick 10 questions to get polled on by the community and ask the top 3.

Lets look at this from another profession. As an automotive technician, im expected to complete work in a fast and timely manner, both for the company and the customer. If it takes me an extremely long time to complete the job (the customer is paying a much higher bill since work is hourly, and is effectively wasting money when another shop couldve done it quicker and cheaper. When im doing say, a brake job, and my boss comes out to the bays and says, "Hey, how much longer till you're done? Im paying you you know right?" and if I reply "Soon, i have no new details to share at this time." Im getting fired.

People need to stop thinking that software development is like some kind of magic that nobody understands, its like people think that the timetables on new content are always going to be a mystery because its only when the purple snicklous of the 8th plane conflumigate their mystic and ancient powers of gordlunsh will content be allowed to release to the public so we should just shut up, roll alts, and continue to feed the higher beings our subscription money so that they are appeased. No, its a group of software professionals who have a job and reasonable expectations put onto them since their pay is coming out of our wallets. it's not unreasonable to ask, hey there fellas, soooooo.....what have you been doing for the past 8 months while you've been billing my paypal account?

Considering the sheer volume of people who quit based directly on the changes in 1.2 (half a dozen in the guild I was in at the time alone), I have no idea how you can say that brushing off hundreds, if not thousands, of comments with a 2 sentence response was good for the game. It is a huge mistake to assume the people in charge of a game play the game at the highest level. This has been proven in basically every MMO since EQ1

MMO players, in general, seem to take a "board of directors" entitlement approach to the games.

By this I mean that they often behave like they are on the companies board and that everything they share warrants a direct and immediate response by the companies developer and support staff.

We're very excited to see constructive feedback, and the threads mentioned here have generally been exactly that. Part of what the community team does is read what players are saying across many outlets (the forums, social networking, places like reddit, etc), compile feedback, and send it along. These threads have provided us with a lot of good and generally focused and detailed feedback, and we wanted to encourage them so we'd see even more constructive feedback in them to round up and pass along!

I don't have any specific plans of action on individual items to share (and remember, we're always gathering and passing feedback along already - you may remember the class feedback threads we posted a while ago), but your suggestions, complaints, and feedback definitely reach the developers, and it helps inform decisions about upcoming changes and content.

Also with my own mmo experience i can tell you this± the amount of content BW has pushed out is the highest so far of any mmo. So your complaints are not valid at all.