Quote Originally Posted by Lunaxia View Post
I feel like those days where they really pushed that honest sort of communication - or open communication at all, really - with the fans are slowly coming to an end. They put the effort in when they needed to save the game from the mess they got themselves in, but now they've achieved a reasonable degree of success they're defaulting to the usual mega gaming corporation behaviour that I suspect will continue unless they dig themselves into a hole again - and now they've managed to pull in the casual RP/ modder/ glamour obsessed communities looking for a new social sim, so long as they keep chucking overpriced outfits on the MS, inserting cyberpunk and modern glams into the game's gear and turning their head the other way at the venue spam, that's not going to be happening anytime soon. Keeping expectations low is probably for the best.

I kind of wonder how the devs feel about it, though, and where these decisions actually come from.
I wouldn't be surprised if the decrease in open communication comes partially from the playerbase becoming as big as it did. It's not a phenomenon unique to game development - it's something you can see in daily life in different communities as well, albeit on a smaller scale (something like discord servers centered around some topic, for example).

It's one thing to communicate with smaller amount of people that mostly share the same view on the topic, and it's another thing to communicate with a community that bloated in size and, as result, has a huge variety of opinions that are objectively impossible to satisfy simultaneously. And wherever creators and members of said communities like it or not, at some point those who're in charge have to somewhat distance themselves and decide which path they're going to take in terms of project evolution (which will cause some people to like and some people to dislike those decisions).