Developer lack of communication

[Belhi]

Really that is what you take away from the live letters and community management? You know how many times questions get ignored because they don't want to answer them. Or when they implement major systems and put little fore thought into how the community is going to play it and having someone who can respond.They can plan to hang out in Germany/UK/US but can't have a dev and translator when new content goes live. I don't mean a patch with two dungeons and some clicking on npcs.

Hunts and the pure server melting system they were at launch. No one could have fore seen it and been ready to respond? Housing and reclamation? Diadem v2 was slightly faster. But I chalk that up to timing/luck, not them planning and responding.

Would you prefer a developer to be adjusting content due to feedback from the CMs or would you prefer them to be talking on forums (slowly since they don't actually read English and there are 3 different forums they would have to read)? Even then they wouldn't be able to give any definitive promises or assurances till they looked at what they could adjust. Then there is the fact that the official forums are actually a pretty small part of the player base and their draw feedback from multiple other sources. Lets not forget that often feedback can be contradictory or unfocused.

I say they pay attention to feedback because Yoshi P has referenced conversations on the official forums several times during interviews and Live letters meaning the CMs are doing their job. The CMs are the communication point for players, particularly in English speaking countries since the devs aren't native English speakers, and I would prefer if they mainly get involved in discussions when they have some solid information to contribute rather than just popping in to give vague assurances which won't satisfy anyone or people will take as ironclad promises that they clearly aren't. Development teams need to be extremely careful what they say because players almost always take anything said as a promise or a guarantee. If Yoshi said 'We might look at a glamour system' you would have people posting a couple of months later complaining that Yoshi P promised a glamour system and that the dev teams break their promises.

Alterations are generally slow because any change they make requires a lot of checks to make sure it doesn't break anything else. MMOs are extremely complex games technically speaking and one small change can throw a lot of other things out of whack. You don't do sudden turns with an MMO without risking breaking things and making the situation worse. They address stuff but they take the time to make sure what they are addressing and consider how to and how they can address it.

It is easy to say they communicate. Any little info or gesture can count.

I wonder how many 'we are looking at the issues' you would get before you started say they need to stop saying they will do something and do something. that is usually what happens with little gestures.

[Moonlite]

snip.

I would prefer that they plan to have the appropriate staff available when they make a decision that is probably iffy. I swear for all the "I love online games. I play online games. I am a gamer" They have very little touch on things that are going to go bad. Hunts a mob the whole server can get credit on. That isn't going to turn pout poorly. X amount of houses to be released on servers that have 10 times the amount of players and a login server that can't handle the stress. Houses open for reclamation over Xmass. Diadem giving raid level items in random drop. These aren't even balance issues. They are awesome game design that is going to cause the player base to be upset. In fact they should also have more GMs on when introducing this type of content.

Instead of all this promo pre SB. A launch job guide made by the dev team would have been way better. Because we needed SE to spend the money and time putting on 3 fanfests with so much info. The media tour the time spent at E3. Maybe work on game release game promo after.

Also the fact other games have ptr limits some of the crap that goes on in the forum. Might be time to evaluate why that works so well for other games. But oh no the lore. Heaven forbid someone knows someone dies. As if they aren't coming back two patches anyway. I swear people need to think about what quality story telling is. This is no better then those soap operas that used to air.