The forums are flawed as the main way to collect player feedback.

[Jeeqbit]

The forums are flawed as the main way to collect player feedback.

They collect it from social media and reddit as well because Yoshi-P specifically stated this even recently. It's just that the forums are something they control and is easy for them to check what they run and organize themselves, as opposed to say reddit, which has an upvote system and a lot of non-feedback. I agree the system could be improved though because I know other games have done it better. For example, a lot of apps have an issues system where people can raise an issue and then people upvote the issues so the most pressing ones are at the top. However it becomes too full if duplicates aren't moderated.

it is also full of bad faith criticism. I imagine it's hard for them to find the good feedback here when many posts are completely ridiculous and say stuff like "Yoshi P hates us, (content) literally ruined my life, ded game" (this is barely an exaggeration)

I agree so much. Statements like that are ridiculous and out of touch. Anyone that watches live letters and interviews can see he doesn't "hate" anyone, that he is still very passionate and anyone that observes the statistics properly can see it's not dead and is far bigger in population than it used to be.

I think it has a big flaw in its logic. There are also people who are silent because they are happy with things and didn't feel the need to make a forum account to complain.

While that's true, the point of the statement is nevertheless to listen to the minority who complain because silent people may be thinking that also but not expressing it.

I think their flawed method of collecting feedback shows in changes like the mount tilt system. A small minority of players didn't like it so they nerfed it

I doubt they even based it on forum feedback. A developer probably just thought "this looks overboard, let's make it a bit more realistic". I don't usually get the sense changes are even based on forum feedback. Often it's based on a passing conversation Yoshi-P had with a journalist and passed to the dev team, or a video they chanced to watch from a popular youtuber, or something like that. You can often trace changes like that to an interview or popular video from the last year after all. The alliance raid roulette change comes to mind as an example, where they ignored it for years until MrHappy brought it up in his forum reading video... there had been forum posts about it on a regular basis for literally years before this.

What they should do is implement some form of player survey, either in-game or in emails to improve their data collection by seeking out the average player rather than having skewed data from the forums.

They have definitely done such surveys before because I (and others on this forum that they regarded as veteran players) received a survey a few years ago. But it doesn't seem like a universal or regular thing. Surveys often just get given to small, weighted sample sizes though so it's hard to be sure that they don't do them.