SE: Holding back information won't stop criticism, it will only delay it and is bad.

[Valorak]

I'll definitely agree to disagree. Personally, a 24-page reaction to an event is more reaction than any event has gotten in a while, and it shows that the players were able to invest themselves in these characters we only got snippets of. At the end of the day, I think even pure hatred is better than apathy; the day that the community is completely apathetic towards the game is the day Yoshi P has lost.

I hear what you're saying, and while I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment that passion/anger > apathy, I hesitate to use that in this situation. People disproportionately weigh in on things when they're angry so it doesn't necessarily indicate that people weren't enjoying events before. There wasn't much useful information to be found in that topic, imo.

I'm really glad that people are passionate about the game, but that doesn't mean that any and all complaints are immediately vindicated just because people are loud and passionate about it, nor does it make them qualified to accurately predict how class changes are going to affect balance. The community has been wrong about the effect of incoming changes just as many times as it has been right about them.

Maybe if I couldn't switch between classes then I would care more about quick turn-around on class balance and open dialogue about it, but between having all classes on one character and the fact that they've stated that they ultimately don't care if one class is 1% dps over the other one, I don't view it as a big deal. People who live for the meta like that are gonna be loud regardless of what they do (exhibit a: World of Warcraft), so I suppose it makes sense for them to limit the amount of noise that they have to hear until after the changes have actually hit.

A large portion of that thread isn't complaining that "their favorite" didn't win, most people are criticizing (with good cause) the terrible writing that was displayed and how SE had essentially rigged the outcome from the beginning. Thinking that the female, previously known NPC, sporting red on Valentines wasn't going to win is a pretty far fetch. Versus two new characters in not red coloring.

Hmmm... I saw a decent amount of people complaining about the writing (although there was also voter bias in some of those posts too); But I also read enough of that topic to know that the majority of posters were there to complain about people being too lazy to read text, or claiming that people had just picked Astrid because she was a girl, or that she was familiar etc. There was also a fair number of people proclaiming their hatred for office/work romances, and a smattering of people admitting that they just picked her because they knew her/wanted the red clothes. Personally, I didn't find much criticism in that topic that I would consider to be constructive. Definitely not enough for 24 pages and one or two spin-off topics.